I also want to point out that there are millions of Asian students in the US and only a tiny tiny fraction (I bet less than 1%) of them come here to vent about their Asian F’s and their parents. And probably some of them might be the children of Asian Tiger parents. However, they represent a tiny % of entire US Asian population. Doesn’t anyone realize this? People on CC might read these threads and perceive a widespread problem of Asian tiger parenting, but therein lies the fallacy of many anecdotes in the CC posts.
No, they’re just the majority who seek out competitive college admissions help in my particular region. I said that earlier. And again, there is no need to take these observations personally if you yourself, and your friends, do not share such attitudes and demands. I already mentioned that a minority of Asian parents I have seen u are no more inclined to pressure and restriction than probably a majority of Caucasian parents.
And you mentioned the word “strict” in Reply 86, without distinguishing it from so-called Tiger Parenting. I do distinguish it, and strictness is not to what I refer. Nor is it in the title of this thread.
I have had three clients in the last year who are Caucasian; two of those families include dual-professional couples who are quite ambitious, yet there is no demand on the child to be one particular “type” of person or another, to pursue one particular track instead of a personally preferred and more suitable one. In my entire life I have never met any non-Asian family who has restricted a son or daughter from pursuing an academic preference or clean extracurricular activity, or certainly not in the brutal manner I have personally witnessed and which has been acknowledged by the parents.
Regarding Caucasian parenting and generalizations:
Lots of Caucasian parents are more like me, but they, and I, are probably the minority among Caucasian parents. When I say “like me,” I mean both strict and traditional. Most of my Caucasian friends are more permissive and “open” as parents than I am. But I recognize that a valid generalization can be made. Apparently generalizations are only “racist” when they’re applied to non-Caucasians. (Aw, I get it now.)
And just to be clear, I do not interpret “permissive and open” to be necessarily a compliment. Lots of comedians have derided the Caucasian style of parenting, but there’s no reason for me to take the generalization personally, and to spend multiple posts “defending” absent Caucasian parents. For that matter, as everyone knows who has seen my posts from 2004 on on CC, I am not a particular fan of Rachel Toor, in her dismissive characterization of the white applicant pool to Duke, in her book College Confidential, as BWRK’s. But there was truth to the generalization which bored her too much. (She was really more bored with her job than with the applicants’ files per se, in my view.) They were Bright, Well-Rounded Kids, “doing all the right things” they thought would get them into fine colleges, before she did her best to reject as many of them as possible. I’d be happy to write a script mocking Western White parenting as sometimes being the extreme on the touchy-feely spectrum.
@epiphany
“No, they’re just the majority who seek out competitive college admissions help in my particular region. I said that earlier… I already mentioned that a minority of Asian parents I have seen (and I have obviously not met the entire universe of them) are no more inclined to pressure and restriction than probably a majority of Caucasian parents.”
The problem with this and your other posts are that these posts UNINTENTIONALLY give the impression or reinforce the narrative that many Asian parents are Tiger parents.
You obviously run/work in some type of college advising service (which I’m guessing is not cheap). Then, I am guessing that nearly all (100%) of Asian families you meet in your work are very wealthy or least wealthy enough to afford such services. This population of wealthy Asian families probably represent a very small and skewed (and perhaps entitled) population which do not represent the great majority of Asian families in the US or in Asia. Thus, making general assumptions about a typical Asian family based on your experience with this selective Asian population is not valid. It is similar to running a survey on a small and biased population (e.g. shoppers at Nordstrom) and extrapolating the data to the general public. This kind of generalization is not only valid but can also unfortunately create misguided stereotypes. I have no problem if you write about your own experiences with Asian families who are abusive to their kids. But I take issues in the fact that these limited anecdotes are generalized by some to the rest of Asian families.
Perhaps a lot of the specific race-related assertions comes from the direct assertion of Chua’s book that her story is (“supposed to be”) about “how Chinese mothers are superior to their Western counterparts.” Sounds like an explicit race-based argument to me.
“Perhaps a lot of the specific race-related assertions comes from the direct assertion of Chua’s book that her story is (“supposed to be”) about “how Chinese mothers are superior to their Western counterparts.” Sounds like an explicit race-based argument to me.”
That is her own (and only her) assertion, which I might add is not only stupid and wrong but also a racist remark. But this kind of overgeneralization (Asian parents are tiger parents and Chinese mothers being superior to Western mothers) is just wrong and should not be condoned.
I did not read Chua’s book and have never had any interests in reading her book. I first learned of the term “tiger parent” because the media talked about her book. Our family somehow do not like that Ms. Chua came out and wrote such a controversial, “explosive” book.
My wife once asked DS (when he had grown up) whether we are tiger parents, he told us we are not. We are glad to hear this from him. (Even though I might have prepared more and maybe too much “learning materials” for our kid when he was growing up, we had no complaints as long as he had read and digested 50-60% of what he was given. Will you label us as “tiger parents” when we only asked him to finish, say, about 50-60% of the assigned work?!)
BTW, a few generations ago, was it also true that a lot of young Jewish people learned violin and piano and many were very accomplished violinists and pianists?
Maybe 3 generations later, Asian Americans will not be so concentrated on these few music instruments too.
In the all-state orchestra in our state, about 10 years ago, there were indeed many Asian American students playing these two major instruments. One reason is likely that many of them started the instruments at a relatively young age and by the time they were high schoolers, they could have been practicing on this instruments every day for a decade or even longer. Actually, the main focus of Suzuki method is not to produce the good musicians. Its focus is more on the “character building” through the discipline and to nurture a “fine” person. I think it is this aspect of the benefits that appeals to those in the Asian culture.
Considering she is American-born and more importantly, her parents grew up as part of an ethnic Chinese minority in the Philippines, I’m really not sure it’s a good idea to regard her as an authority on Chinese parenting…except within her family or to a lesser extent…the ethnic Chinese minority community in the Philippines.
I agree, it’s a pretty stupid assertion on her part. But given that her book seems to be the main focus of this topic and she made very explicit race-related claims in it, I can definitely see why people bring up the issue of Asian racial tendencies.
Also, those tendencies to micromange, direct, and limit majors/career choices aren’t limited to Asian/Asian-American families, either.
I’ve cited several examples of multi-generationed “tiger parents” who did the same regarding education(i.e. older HS alums who remembered living with such parents or knew classmates who had…including one who is eligible to be a member of the DAR) or other areas such as sports.
It also brings up one hardcore 20+ year retired Marine father of an elementary school classmate who was obsessed with getting his son into Annapolis to be a commissioned Marine ringknocker and openly expressed disappointment and anger in his son when he was shut out of the FSAs despite earning a full Army ROTC scholarship to a local private college straight out of HS.
Also, the older neighborhood kid who attended the same public magnet as yours truly and whose father was befuddled and visibly disappointed his son turned down a full FA package to MIT for Annapolis so he could increase his chances of being assigned to nuclear subs wasn’t Asian-American. Incidentally, his Japanese-American mother was much more laid back on this score and was the one who got on his non-Asian father’s case to tone down his expression of disappointment in his son’s college/career choice.
The father was not Asian/Asian-American and their family has been in the US long enough so my classmate would have been a 5th generation American at the very least.
I’m also tired of the Asian bashing. I think the HYPSM Asian kids are probably put forth because they are the most visible but there are hundreds of other Asian kids for every one of the HYPSM kids who are not remarkable at all. As with other unremarkable students, no one pays any attention to them. They aren’t seen or heard but trust me, not every parent sends their child to HYPSM or even dreams of it (we would have to pay that tuition).
What’s really funny is that the vast majority of the Chinese people who come the the US for grad school go to non-Ivies. In fact, I hear schools like Alabama, Georgia Tech or Georgia, Tulane, NC State, Florida, Iowa, Iowa State, Wyoming, Nebraska, Minnesota, Maryland. Occasionally, I’ll hear Johns Hopkins or Duke.
Just as the media focus on a handful of colleges, the elite schools, they also focus on a tiny subset of the Asian population. This intense focus inflates the view that most Asian parents, or even a significant proportion of Asian parents are these “limiting” pushy, overly demanding people who make their child apply to HYPSM. The fact of the matter is you don’t need straight A’s, 2400 and half a million dollars to attend a good college. And Asian parents run the gamut of strictness and Asian students range from barely community college to the elite. Asian students participate in sports, even team sports. Asian parents run the gamut from permissive to totalitarian, just like other races. I’m not convinced that Asian parents lean toward the limiting, strict stereotype presented in this thread. I have never heard of parents limiting their kids options in anything - EC sports, hobbies, instruments, anything. (Okay, my parents didn’t allow me to take ballet but that was because my sister quit twice, not because they’s Chinese).
Coming to CC, one would think every student scores 2200+/32+ and has an unweighted 3.9+ GPA. Kids with 3.75GPA lament their low and poor grades. In fact, if you look around, you realize this is a teeny tiny part of all high school students, no matter that there are hundreds or thousands of students on CC.
I will admit that the majority of my siblings and I and their offspring have attended, either undergrad and/or grad, the Ivies and Stanford and MIT as well as two public Ivies. But I think the fact that we attended these schools informed us that they are NOT the holy grail of higher education. They are fantastic schools but there, as CC showed me, are many other fantastic schools.
I feel about tiger parenting the same way I feel about certain medical manipulation practices in sports. The latter are not technically illegal based on the letter of the law, but violate the spirit of the law due to being potentially dangerous and harmful to the health of the athlete. For example, the notorious Nike running coach Alberto Salazar, while extremely successful, has come under fire for things like getting all his athletes on thyroid medication (and I think asthma inhalers). For an athlete who doesn’t medically need those legal drugs but is prescribed them by complicit doctors, they can be performance-enhancing. Such practices make it tougher for totally clean athletes to compete.
Similarly, there are parents in my community who are willing to force their children to attend classes and study non-stop (even on Sunday mornings and all summer long) from the time they are very young to the exclusion of playtime and social activities and being the 4th villager. They are willing to hound them mercilessly about grades and to link academic performance with familial honor, so that the child has a do-or-die survival mentality about getting A’s. He must excel or he shames the whole family. Some even use physical punishments like holding out their arms, laden with textbooks, due to a bad grade. For those parents who are not prepared to do this because we believe it’s harmful, the fact that other parents do can nonetheless affect our children’s academic standing and admissions chances. The tiger mentality applied to music or sports also harms those who don’t engage in it. A child can be very passionate and hard-working with respect to a sport or instrument, but might not even make the high school ensemble or team because he wants or needs balance in his life. Maybe he is prepared to practice violin two hours daily, but he is competing against kids who were made to practice 5 hours daily all through elementary school.
Obviously, I can only speak from our experience here, which is that my kids have been the only non-Asian in their honors and AP classes, or one of only 2 or 3. Thus, they spend much of their school day with Asian kids and hear their conversations. All of my S’s friends, including his girlfirend of 5 years, were Asian. In our area, tiger parenting is very very real and the kids suffer. So I read and comment about tiger parenting because I believe that expressing a strong negative opinion of these practices may help them be eradicated, especially because it’s not quite so do-or-die here as it is in their home countries.
PS All my children have been involved in competitive sports, though not football. In many years of both and league and school play, we only encountered one tiger sports dad (a Jewish white guy). Sure, there were eager beaver parents and some would scream, but this guy would pick up his son from a 4-hour summer soccer camp and take him directly to the baseball field to practice that sport next–in the midday heat.
OP here:
To be honest, I do think that Asian parents are being vilified upon closer inspection. I realize that the way my parents has raised me is socially acceptable, because they appear White, however, my Asian friends have their families criticized for the same parenting policies. (at least in my circle) That’s not ok.
Additionally, my Asian friends are now achievers because they are Asian. Because they simply must have “tiger” parents. Not because they have worked incredibly hard or because they love what they pursue but simply because they are Asian and their parents have forced them. In this same way, my Asian friends who are not so academically inclined are ridiculed as being dumb “for an Asian” even when their grades are just average. The expectation that they should be smart both diminishes the accomplishments of my high achieving friends and puts unrealistic and damaging expectations on my friends who are just getting through school as they will. This is racism and it’s really easy to overlook because I think it’s easy to forget that Asians are a minority too. Saying an Asian is an achiever because they are Asian is the same as saying a Black student got in because they were black. It is demeaning their achievements by attributing them to their race and that is really not cool.
There is no denying that some Asian kids are driven hard by their parents, but this is not the majority. This is what some Asian and non-Asian parents on this thread are trying to convey. You don’t need summer schools and extreme nonstop studying in order to take honors or AP classes. None of my kids have ever taken summer classes nor do they study nonstop, yet they are taking the honors and AP classes. Let me give you my own experience here in New Orleans. In my kids HS, there are very few Chinese and Koreans, but a sizable Vietnamese students (~25% total Asians), and most kids in the honors and AP classes are white, not Asians. In my son’s AP classes, there may be 3 or 4 Asians and the rest white and African-Americans. There are also disproportionately higher % of high-achieving African-American kids. As I have posted before, there are few driven white and African-American parents who are pushing their kids hard. I get (hear) this information from my kids, like most parents here on CC. So from my own anecdote, I might derive that there are more non-Asian Tiger parents at my kids HS. But I do not, because I know that small sample size does not represent the whole population.
Well, yeah, I do know this about some families. Look, nobody is saying that a majority of Asian families fit this pattern, or that it has anything to do with race. It has to do with culture, which is why (in my opinion) it may be more noticeable in certain regions, and in particular among immigrant striver populations. I think what makes it particularly observable among Asian families (at least around here) is that the pattern of restriction is really quite uniform: piano or violin, tennis, test prep, certain STEM activities. In other groups, there may be similar “tiger” behavior, but the pattern isn’t so uniform: there are crazy baseball dads, crazy musical theater moms, etc. I haven’t seen any crazy debate parents, but they may be out there. It’s true that the same image used to be prevalent of Jewish kids, down to the violin and piano–and that was cultural, too. There are still remnants of it in lots of Jewish families.
As I also said above, whether this is good or bad depends on what you are trying to accomplish. (Note: extremism can be bad even in a good cause; see Amy Chua’s version of this, whether she actually did it or not.) If you highly value a set of cultural norms, strongly urging your children to observe them is reasonable. That’s why we still have groups like the Amish. So if you think it’s really important, culturally, for your kid to play violin or piano, and to concentrate on studies as opposed to frivolous activities, and to focus on a stable and portable career, then it makes perfect sense to teach your children to do these things. If, on the other hand, you think these things are a strategy for elite college admission and general success in the United States, you’re imposing counterproductive restrictions on your children’s lives.
I have no particular stake in this, except that, as @epiphany suggested, I’ve felt sorry for some kids who I felt were being restricted unreasonably and counterproductively.
Which of the following are true -
A) Asian students are no more or less likely to go into certain majors / fields than anyone else
Or
B) Asian students are more likely to cluster into STEM fields (whether by innate desire or parental pressure); that is explainable by the belief that such fields are more secure job-wise, which makes sense if you are an immigrant worried about economic insecurity.
Note that only one of these can be true. And neither is a value judgment, just an observation.
Well, cowtownbrown, you are correct but that doesn’t mean the stereotype isn’t based upon real facts and tendencies. Of course no generalizations are ever accurate for every member of a group, but that doesn’t mean they are baseless either. (By the way, in our high school, Caucasians are stereotyped as academically lazy to the extent that those who actually make it into AP classes are called “honorary Asians.” You know, they must be somewhat Asian because most white kids aren’t that smart or studious. There’s some truth to that, but it’s relative.)
Anamol, I suggest you google “Asian parents” or “Asian mother” and see all the references that come up, especially videos made by Asian kids. Someone upthread mentioned the Erick Liang ones. His are in good fun and I think his mother is probably very loving. Others, however show a deep level of pain. The Liang ones came out when S was in high school, and S’s friends thought they were completely accurate and descriptive of their own experiences.
I don’t think most of us are saying that all Asians, or even a majority of Asians, are tiger parents. But I do think this is a pattern common to some Asian families. I only know one child whose parents I feel restricted her life in an abusive way. One of the relatively few Asians in our community. Most of the others have parents who I would consider to have high standards for their kids, but not abusive to my knowledge, although they certainly are flocking to STEM activities and string instruments. Of course, I don’t know whether these were chosen freely or imposed by the parents. Incidentally, I also know one Asian child whose immigrant parents came out of some very high pressure situations. They seemed to have a very negative view of that upbringing and were among the most permissive parents I know. Their child was allowed more freedom than most to manage his own life and he handled it very well and became one of the most interesting kids I know.
As far as the statements about Jews and other immigrant groups, I know far more Jews than Asians and I have not seen it. I did read Chua’s book and I was shocked.
Pizza, I don’t agree with your analysis. There are sub-groups among Asians in the US whose rate of college attendance lags that of the general population (Hmong, Vietnamese)-- and they certainly aren’t “gunning” for STEM careers. There are plenty of first and second gen Asian kids studying sociology and history (I interview plenty of them) and they don’t play violin and some are even-horrors- bad at math.
I think you look at the tiny chunk- let’s call it the Ivy/JHU/Cal Tech bound- and extrapolate to the entire population which is a mistake. Go walk the campus of Queens College or Baruch (or any urban public U in a city with a significant Asian population) and talk to kids. From my observation, the diversity of academic goals is pretty much inline with their non-Asian peers on those campuses. The non-Asians complain that these kids study harder-- and “raise the curve”… an Asian kid majoring in sociology or linguistics or psych doesn’t see it as a four year excuse to party- but they are no more all gunning to be doctors or computer scientists than anyone else.
So the phenomenon of a few thousand Asian college kids at the tippy top of the academic heap… I don’t see that as representative. In my own small city- Asian kids on academic probation! Asian kids in Special Ed! Asian kids in summer school because they flunked Trig! Just like everyone else!!!
Is there even a disagreement here over how many Asian families fit the pattern some of us have observed?
An old cliché about Jewish families was “my son, the doctor.” You don’t hear that much anymore, but there are still a lot of Jewish families with a lot of doctors. My wife’s grandfather was a doctor, her mother is a doctor, her uncle is a doctor, her sister is a doctor, and two of her three first cousins are doctors. When I once (inadvisedly) suggested that she also became a doctor because that is what is valued in her family, she took offense and said that had nothing to do with it–it was entirely her own choice. (Incidentally, her sister–who married a doctor–has two kids. One is a doctor, and the other has just started a postbac because she’s decided now that she wants to be a doctor, too.) This is a cultural thing. It can affect your choices even if there is no direct pressure.