Why is the media/public so quick to pick on "Tiger Parenting" in Asian families?

Parents Forum
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@Hunt
You are right about the Korean kids in church. A very large number (still don’t know if its majority) of Korean families in the US go to church and hence, leave a significant impact on the views/personalities/religions of Korean kids.

Regarding your note about blacks being more athletic than Asians, I vaguely remember way back (perhaps 80’s or 90’s) a ESPN or other sports commentator/announcer making a similar remark about African American and their strong athletic prowess which caused a huge uproar as a racist remark and subsequently fired from his job. So yes, while it’s certainly true (based on statistics unlike the Asian Tiger parent claims), a simple stating of facts can and sometimes are viewed as racism.

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The politics of what is fair to say on TV, where gut reaction matters more than substance, differs from what is reasonable to consider in a discussion such as the one here.

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Remember that Asian immigrants to the US are a skewed selection of people compared to their countries of origin. Think of the visa types that most originally came in on.

For example, bachelor’s degree attainment among Chinese immigrants to the US is about 50%, far higher than in China (under 10%). So the “tiger” attitudes may be more of a reflection of those who passed the fiercely competitive gaokao than of Chinese culture in general.

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Always read my words carefully if you want to know what I’m saying. I said nothing about athletic prowess. I specifically referred to basketball. To what might I have been referring?

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@blossom “I’d take issue with anyone who claimed that parents wanting their kids to become doctors is a universal Jewish cultural trait- it’s not, even though it might be among the subset of Jews that someone knows personally. I could point you to high schools in Lakewood NJ where Jewish kids don’t even take SAT’s, let alone prep for MCAT’s.The sad thing is that while it is clear that tiger parenting is an awful approach. The percent of parents who are like this is small.”

I agree, but I am sure that is true for Asians too.

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OK, This will be my last post on this topic. The only reason that I engaged in this long discussion about the topic was to speak out against Asian biases, not to change the minds and the opinions of some posters. I think I have done that. It was fun “talking” to you all.

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And it seems people keep forgetting that Amy Chua is American-born and her parents grew up IN THE PHILLIPPINES, NOT IN CHINA. While her family was part of the Chinese ethnic minority there, her family influences were heavily influenced by being a minority in a Philippine majority culture.

Also, school districts like TheGFG’s or WWP are atypical not only due to high SES, but the over-the-top academic competitiveness.

One branch of my family spent decades in another NNJ suburb before it became an upper-middle class suburban enclave with a school district comparable to WWP in ratings without the insane competitiveness.

Relatives who attended the high school in that upper-middle class NNJ suburb attended from the '70s till the 2010’s and were flabbergasted that there were school districts like WWP or TheGFG’s district. Among those relatives were those who ended up and excelled at Ivy/elite Us and slackers who had issues completing college at in-state publics or lower-tiered private colleges on the 4-year plan and when completed…graduated with a cum GPA in the vicinity of the low 2.x.

Also, most of the Asian-American middle school classmates weren’t put into cram schools or were inclined to be studious. In fact, some ended up being HS dropouts or worse, joining one of the Chinatown gangs after dropping out.

Also, this conversation obscures the presence of Asian-Americans who weren’t part of the college-educated portion of immigrants…especially before 1965.

For instance, most parents of Asian-American classmates in middle/high school weren’t college grads at all. In fact, most worked various service jobs such as waiting tables, short-order cooks, laborers, etc. A few were even middle school/elementary school dropouts in their home countries.

Also, while my Asian-American startup supervisor who was born in the US in the '50s was a college graduate, his brother barely graduated from the neighborhood public high school and dropped out of college(Schools like post-1969 CUNY, Hofstra, St. John’s U, etc) after a semester of mediocre/flunking grades sometime in the '70s. They also grew up in a working-class family with parents who didn’t finish high school/middle school due to the need to work and wartime factors (Warlord era with its violent chaos)*.

  • Living in a period(1916-~late '20s) in a region where there was effective total anarchy and where marauding warlord armies are rampaging around the countryside attacking each other, looting the local populace, and seizing adolescent/young adult males to serve in their ranks wasn't exactly conducive for the establishment or maintenance of educational institutions or their ability to provide education to their students.
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For the record, Anamgol, saying “Every X person I have met is " is not the same thing as saying "Every X person is _.” The former is a conclusion drawn from an admittedly small sample, while the latter is a gross generalization. In the case of this thread, the former statement happened to support the observations publicized by plenty of others through books and social media, including by numerous X people themselves. It’s rude to keep claiming the comment is racist, but if you persist, then please be consistent and call out user0509, Chua, Erick Liang, Chen etc. as racist too. You might also label as racist the Asian poster above who mentioned that one of her son’s friends is denied dinner when he gets a grade lower than an A, since of course not ALL parents deprive their children of dinner. And I notice no one seems to be calling Chua racist for defining and discussing “Western parenting” in order to contrast it with Tiger Parenting, as if “Western parenting” were a monolithic thing.

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Let me try this on: Every man I have met is violent, all the Irish I have met are drunks, every teen I have met is sex-crazed, every Muslim who I have met is a fanatic, every black I have met is. . .

If this is your idea of appropriate generalization, I don’t see any point in continuing the discussion.

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Now when did anyone say something even remotely resembling those generalizations?

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Here you go, Mamalion!

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/what-is-a-straw-man-argument

Albeit it shines by its irrelevance to this discussion, let me assure you that we understand the implication of faulty generalizations.

You keep arguing a point nobody has made or defended.

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Gosh, this really will be my final post on this thread. I copy/paste the post from TheGFG:

“However, I have never met an immigrant Chinese parent here who would not qualify as a tiger parent.”

To me that sounds a lot like “Every immigrant Chinese I met is a tiger parent”, no?

@TheGFG I don’t know if you care to read my post (#165 or so?), but I did call out Chau’s statement about Western parenting as being racist.

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When I was a kid, all the Catholic families we knew had a lot of kids. We lived in a relatively small town in the south, so there weren’t that many Catholic families. Now, who have I insulted, exactly? Now, I will admit that we assumed most Catholic families elsewhere also had lots of kids, and we thought it was probably because they didn’t practice birth control. We may well have been wrong on both counts. But it was simply a fact that the families we know had lots of kids. See how that works?

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A lot more delicatessens are owned by Jews than by, say, Finns.

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Boy, saying having kids and owning delis are viewed as relatively ethically neutral, aside from some environmentalist or some Marxists. Saying that all Chinese are tiger parents criticizes the entire ethnic group as cruel to children.

Time to call it done.

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For the umpteenth time, no one made that statement. Second, there’s abuse and then there’s tiger parenting. Sometimes the two intersect but they are distinct

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In NYC you’d find most delis owned by Koreans or Dominicans, though immigrants from other areas are increasingly opening them now. Then again, NYers call any small retail grocery that makes sandwiches a deli whether it stocks kosher meats or not.

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From the article that Zeldie posted, it does seem there is some evidence that shaming is a culturally-specific parenting style associated with Asians. Please note that a researcher named Fung identified this pattern:

“While seven of the eight parenting dimensions we used would be considered “etic” dimensions, or general measures of parenting, there is one “emic” dimension, or culturally specific measure of parenting: shaming, which Heidi Fung (1999) defines as a culturally specific type of Asian parenting in which parents actively pressure their children to internalize feelings of shame for not conforming to norms or for failing to perform as parents expect.”

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An Elite Prep Center in Amish country! I don’t know whether to laugh or weep! I realize it was a joke. The extreme incongruity of it struck me, because I have spent some time in Amish country, as a non-Amish person (i.e., Englisher). While the Amish way of life has its inconveniences, and they are manifold, there is also a beauty in that way of life, which would be a great antidote to true tiger parenting, regardless of who is practicing it. Perhaps it would be good to open an Amish Philosophy Center in hyper-competitive land? :slight_smile:

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Sounds like a great idea! “Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free. 'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be…” (a Shaker song, but it fits.)