crazy chinese mother

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~.

would gladly do so

not out of sadism, but deepest goodwill

xp...

? they have finger position things for guitar chords, much easier than sheet music.

i've been like violently supressing the "this woman is a skin-crawlingly awful mother and her priorities are so hollow as to be deranged" reaction cuz it's so obviously the one the piece is baiting but it's HARD.

how physically abusive would you say parents are by race

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, January 10, 2011 4:29 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

what kind of question is that? standards and expectations regarding such things clearly vary a great deal from culture to culture. race doesn't figure in.

i don't have any idea about how 'realistic' this piece is, but i'd say those girls could use a little perspective nonetheless

and maybe i could borrow some of their stakhanovite work ethic

i'm not sure they'd fall for tam tam's charms even after their glimpse of the void tho....

I've 'known'* a fair amount of ABCs and such and they've by and large struck me as nice and harmless but not very interesting, wondering if they came out of the same parenting background as this

*I once attended a chinese students association meeting and walked out about 15 minutes in, it was like the 9th circle of hell

i've been like violently supressing the "this woman is a skin-crawlingly awful mother and her priorities are so hollow as to be deranged" reaction cuz it's so obviously the one the piece is baiting but it's HARD.

― difficult listening hour, Monday, January 10, 2011 7:47 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

lol well really its just trolling white parents... like, "i raised my kids according to the worst stereotypes of controlling asian mothers... and they are still better than yours"

fwiw all of My Asian Friends(™) had parents like this, in some cases better and in some cases worse than dragonlady here, and their feelings on their upbringings generally seem to be about 50/50 gratitude/resentment... i think its as valid a way to raise kids as any, but it seems like a really exhausting parenting style 2 me

hot half-asian daughters

― Princess TamTam, Sunday, January 9, 2011 4:42 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/3118/pedobearsealofapprovalvm2.gif

*thumbs up*

chinese kids i knew growing up mostly had v busy parents so largely did their own thing afaict

a friend in prep school whose parents were separated (iirc) and whose mother ran a business once insisted to the point of tears that he had done NOTHING all summer holiday apart from watching tv, despite the teacher's inane 'well, you must have done something?' bitching

cool kid, srsly

i think its as valid a way to raise kids as any, but it seems like a really exhausting parenting style 2 me

― Princess TamTam, Monday, January 10, 2011 4:56 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

otm. everybody's talking about how grueling this must be for the kids, but it gotta be damn hard on the parents, too. time-consuming, emotionally demanding, just plain exhausting.

what a waste of a childhood summer. i'd always complete at least 3 snes games.

xpost

andre agassi's dad probably suffered a lot, too. he's still shitty dad, right?

I keep remembering that story of ichiro's father and how he would make ichiro wrestle truck tires or something when he was 10.

wondering what the venn diagram between "crazy asian mother" and "crazy sports dad" is like, probably just a circle

i grew up in hawaii so most of My Asian Friends (read: most of my friends) were like third-generation japanese, which is not very Asian, but some of the second-gen kids had these families. in high school a lot of them did the high-school-rebellion thing, which in these cases was... heartening. pot helped.

generally i find people who went through this kind of thing feel, like TamTam said, mixed: they're grateful because the discipline meant they got As and went to a good college and now have a good job and a stable life; they're resentful because the whole thing was totally insane and they suspect they could have gotten As without it. although then there are the people who seem to have had their imagination like surgically removed -- not "imagination" in some arty finding nemo sense but "imagination" in the sense of "if anything even remotely unexpected or unplanned for happens, are you going to have any idea what should be done about it". flexibility. insouciance. i dunno.

I keep remembering that story of ichiro's father and how he would make ichiro wrestle truck tires or something when he was 10.

heh, i thought of that too! he despises his dad now btw, sooo

http://abovethelaw.com/_old/Bad%20Report%20Card.jpg

http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs30/f/2008/082/4/b/Gendo_Ikari_by_Darthval.jpg

i think my dad was chill as long as i wasn't " a poof" or "a bloody drug addict".

lol lamp

andre agassi's dad probably suffered a lot, too. he's still shitty dad, right?

― Philip Nunez, Monday, January 10, 2011 5:09 PM (29 seconds ago) Bookmark

well, if this kind of parenting is considered "normal", acceptable, laudable or whatever in china, then condemning it starts to slide into xenophobia, self-righteousness, even something like racism (though not racism, because we're talking about differences in culture, not the semblance of differences in race).

note that i'm not saying that such parenting is accepted/encouraged in china, i'm just accepting the author's assertion for the sake of argument. if she's right, then who are we to quibble? especially if her approach gets results (in terms of the "success" it values) and doesn't in the long run result in more damaged children than a laissez-faire approach? i mean, i've known many people raised by much less demanding parents who have mixed appreciation/resentment feelings about them.

hard as a liberal relativist to answer these sorts of questions. i'm comfortable opposing honor killings, female circumcision, the death penalty and other "normal" cultural practices that i find abhorrent, but not so comfortable condemning this.

^ so many scare quotes...