crazy chinese mother

Now I want to see the results of parenting by this mother and the guy who wrote this: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/how-to-be-a-father-a-guide-to-unhappiness/Content?oid=5960877

wow thanks for posting that, great article

this article is kinda challoppy. "omg, everybody thinks childhood is a special, magical time, but it is RUBBISH i tells ya!" my childhood was pretty happy i would say, and one of the things i really miss about being a kid/teenager is the intensity and newness of everything. kids, like adults, can be miserable or happy, obvs.

the misery and fundamental unfairness in being a child has been well-established by Calvin & Hobbes (the cartoon), which speaks to childlike wonderment as well, but it's worth noting that a lot of Calvin's epic fantasies are basically escape from standard second-class citizen treatment that is fundamental to being a kid.

i thought that stranger article was a joke?

its no joke

No matter what you do, how much love and care you supply, how many toys and distractions you provide, a childhood will never be happy. Why? Because the content of a childhood is unhappiness. What's being a child? It's being something you do not want to be—incomplete, unshaped, future-bound.

This is complete bollocks, I had an awesome childhood.

"What's being a child? It's being something you do not want to be—incomplete, unshaped, future-bound."

yeah, looking forward to the future sure sucks. especially when you're naive and optimistic, what fresh hell!

I dunno, childhood does kind of suck.

it's true that you want to be something else when you're a kid, but that something else isn't necessarily "a full-grown adult" -- it's "10" or "13" or "15" or "18" or "21". it's exciting to count down to those things! adults only have one thing to count down to, and they'd rather not.

Isn't the way it goes essentially: kids want to be adults, adults want to kids, and therein lies the neverending discontent?

My dad gave me shit when I only got a 1400 on the SAT. Based on my reaction to that (it was sophomore year, I just stopped giving any kind of fuck junior and senior years), this woman would have killed me as a child. Or I would have pulled a Menendez Bros while she slept.

i remember really wanting to be 11 when i was 8

Isn't the way it goes essentially: kids want to be adults, adults want to kids, and therein lies the neverending discontent? chillwave

Being an adult is awesome, i would never trade it in a million years

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l7cve4WYyB1qdpfemo1_500.jpg

everyone knows that advertising makes big silly promises, but i was just in the grocery store and saw an ad for air-popped potato chips that said "REGRET NOTHING" and i thought man in terms of promises to humans that's like a sliver beneath "NEVER DIE"

anyway yeah if i'd change my childhood it would only be to make myself do different stuff. it was fine. now's fine too. things are just generally fine.

i'm not chinese though so

being an adult vs being a kid would be a great poll

will say my boy who's six will, when overpowered with joy or excitement, let out the funniest "whooooooo" sound, it is kind of a high pitched yelp. yesterday, we built a jump on the sledding hill, sent him over it, and he went flying up in the air. he double bounced out of the tube, slid to a stop, and "WHOOOOOOOO," cue exultations. it was so pure, so fantastic that i started laughing, the too-cool-for-everything tweeners next to us started laughing.

i don't know if his childhood will be happy to him. but i will never forget that. he was happy for a moment.

also, rosebud is now inflatable.

i remember really wanting to be 11 when i was 8

Haha yes I remember on Sesame st in the 70s one of the kids was, maybe 12? And to me she was like the awesome grownup one. I would have been about 6 or 7 I guess.

speaking as a first generation (non-chinese) immigrant and professional educator, i'd say there's a lot of truth to this article re: western and non-western approaches to parenting

man if my parents were like that about getting As in school I'd have been called "garbage" more than 30 times a month in high school

― mavisbeacon666 (San Te), Sunday, 9 January 2011 22:05

BTW the argument is that if your parents were like that you wouldn't not be getting As

i'm sorry if that sounds snarky - i didn't mean it to - i just think a lot of people are ignoring the woman's premise, which is that by being selectively crazy harsh she doesn't have to pull out the crazy harsh very often

speaking as a first generation (non-chinese) immigrant and professional educator, i'd say there's a lot of truth to this article re: western and non-western approaches to parenting

speaking as a first generation (non-chinese) immigrant and professional educator, i'd say there's definitely not

wait, i misread your post vahid. i totally agree. ignore the above.

fwiw my parents weren't exactly "crazy harsh" about grades (nb haven't read the article), but straight As were basically non-negotiable when I was a kid. so i got straight As.*

*actually i got one A-, in 10th grade bio. FFFFUUUUUUUU

"FFFFUUUUUUUU"
"WHOOOOOOOO"

same number of letters (!)

xpost: I kept going for the Calvin & Hobbes book on my shelf while student-teaching, never really knowing why, until one day realized that Calvin was my students and I was the monster battling Spaceman Spiff.

i'm interested in this "non-negotiability" concept

There's probably also something to be said about growing up in New Haven, where probably most-all families there (well the one's that don't live in the highest-crime-rate-in-the-US part of town, at least) are Yale families. I mean, when all the parents of their friends and schoolmates are Ivy League professors, you're probably getting a very different frame of reference about your success.

well i was a terrible negotiator

i dunno, it started with me just being precocious and doing well on my own as a kiddo, without prompting or much effort. then really all my parents had to do was point at past success, remind me that it wouldn't be that difficult (it wasn't, really), and say the word "disappointed"

lol, my parents didn't even check my report card or go to parent-teacher meetings. i'd just give 'em stuff to sign and they'd go "ok". i was generally a well-behaved kid and an A/B student though.

I think I got more grief for being bad at sport and for being shy socially around kids my own age. Grades were the least of my problems.

I was an idiot and high

Hi! :)

I'm a first generation immigrant (chinese too!) and my experience was pretty similar to gbx's. as long as I got good grades I was allowed to play starcraft and N64 and go online in peace. I did play the piano but never practiced for more than 30 minutes a day, and most of that was just desultory going through the motions practicing. lol

there are so many kids with many thousands of hours of vln/piano practice who almost never play said instruments in adulthood

I cheated so much in and at everything sometimes it makes me sick just thinking about it

I'm not gonna front, playing piano probably did help some with my music appreesh nowadays

how physically abusive would you say parents are by race

i was that "if you'd only apply yourself" kid. spectacularly bad grades in high school. senior year my friends watched my scramble to graduate like it was 24.

(i eventually did it by submitting work supposedly done for a "home study" english class that was actually just a binder of longwinded livejournal posts, vouched for by a counselor who like many teachers at that school at that time loathed the administration. so yeah:

I cheated so much in and at everything sometimes it makes me sick just thinking about it)

i sorta wish my parents made me practice instruments harder/more rigorously than they did, tbh

Differences in parenting style I can see, higher academic standards I've witnessed.

But this lady is insane and abusive and not representative of any of the immigrant families I grew up around (primarily Vietnamese and Mexican). Those families were more about helping out at the family business than PRACTICE FOR THREE HOURS OR DIE.

tho not by this woman's insane dictatorial standards, i should say

I can read sheet music, and I can play arpeggios, but I still know nothing about time signatures or how to read guitar chords :(

I hope nobody makes her or her kids look into the abyss and realize that achievements are ~meaningless~

maybe they make her look into the abyss and ~push her~.