Several years ago as network television was losing viewers to cable and the internet, one commentator lamented the loss of moments of collective consciousness that had been created by television shows like The Cosby Show, Friends, and the X-Files. According to this commentator the large audiences these shows commanded enabled a series of ideas and topics to filter into society-at-large, weaving threads of common knowledge into a broad and diverse population. Without these shows, he wondered, would we lose these collective moments, would the quilt of society become just a collection of fabric scraps?
The answer, we have learned, is a resounding no. While on the average day, the multiple media and multiple platforms which people use present an unfathomable array of different content, there are a few stories that manage to find their way into a huge number of them. This kind of viral spreading can be annoyingly ugly when its content is the ridiculous pseudo-dramas of people like Charlie Sheen or Brett Favre. Other times, when a story has a certain depth and its range of harmonics trigger a host of different vibrations in different people, the results can be both fascinating and enlightening. Such a story acts as a mirror, giving us a peek into the souls that constitute our collective.
Amy Chua’s Tiger Mother book is one of these latter type of stories. After a first life on the pages and blog of the Wall Street Journal and a second life in the proliferating discussions about her in blogs like this one, a third life is coming. This month’s Atlantic Monthly contains not one, but two essays reviewing her book and the conversations that have swirled around it. Regular commentators Sandra Tsing Loh and Caitlin Flanagan parse through Chua’s text and the initial knee-jerk reactions to it to pick out some of the less obvious dynamics at work in the conversations these have created. The results make for interesting reading.
*****
The most important theme that emerges from both pieces is that much of what Chua and the reactions to her book represent is less a question of cultural difference and more one of class expectations. Tsing Loh, herself the daughter of a Chinese father who pushed her to excel musically and mathematically, highlights how much “working of connections” and “financial outlay” were involved in bringing Chua’s children to the heights they achieved. This marshalling of monetary and social resources - a mention of which was conspicuously absent in Chua’s Wall Street Journal essay - takes some of the steam out of the mythological power Chua claimed for the Tiger Mother as it reveals a reality that many of us already knew: lots of people work hard; those who rise to the highest levels often have money and/or connections the rest do not. As Tsing Loh jokes after talking about all of Chua’s efforts, “I find this expense less uniquely Chinese than perhaps, dare I say,…, upper-middle-class suburban Jewish”. In other words, it is a question of class, not culture.
Flanagan’s essay approaches the question of class and the reaction to Amy Chua through the lens of the admissions processes in Ivy League-caliber universities. She conjures for us the image of the ‘good mother,’ the professional class woman who has cut back on her career aspirations in order to nurture her child(ren) into the world. The good mother, Flanagan writes, has “certain ideas about how success is life is achieved.” These ideas are built around the notion that if they deeply support a child’s natural talent the rest will fall into place.
In Flanagan’s eyes, the problem for the good mothers is that despite this belief and their desire to rein in the hyper-competitiveness that surrounds their childrearing, they also see anything less than admittance to an Ivy League-caliber school for their children as a failure, a slipping away of elite status, a “banishment to nowhere”. And in many ways they’re right. In Liquidated, her ethnography of Wall Street investment banks, Karen Ho talks about how companies like Goldman Sachs only recruit investment bankers from three or four universities, with Harvard and Princeton topping the list. The same seems to be true for the best law firms and medical positions. So when students miss out on a placement in an Ivy League type school, they suddenly find that many of the roads to the highest positions in business, politics, and society have become unavailable to them. Their ability to improve their class position – to move from the professionals to the elite - has been dealt a severe blow.
So the good mother slowly accedes to the demands of the market. She reluctantly lets the hurricane that is the childhood industrial complex engulf her child, and consequently her family, in its swirl of increasingly time intensive sports teams, music lessons, public service activities, clubs, etc. in hopes that this sacrifice will be enough for the child to snare one of those golden positions.
But, according to Flanagan, its not working. Amy Chua’s kids – the ones whose parents have single-mindedly focused on this goal since their birth - are getting those positions instead. Because their parents have pushed them from day one, kids like Chua’s have developed the singular and spectacular talents that lift them to the top of the pile of applicants in the eyes of university admissions officers. The children of the good mothers, those mothers who want their kids to have both the blissful childhood and the Ivy League education, cannot overcome their mothers’ initial reluctance. In short, they cannot catch up.
*****
As a parent and a rejectee of an Ivy League-caliber school (I was wait-listed at MIT), I came away from reading both essays with a single, depressing thought:
So this really is what it has come down to. Polly is two. Pip is four. We have to decide now whether or not they will pursue admission to an Ivy League-caliber school. It is a choice they do not get to make. If they are going to have a chance to get into Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the like, we have to start doing things now. Because by the time they are old enough to make the choice for themselves, it will be too late to acquire the skills and experiences necessary to do the kind of spectacular things they will need to do in order to make the Ivy League cut.
It is the trap of the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie: I want to give Pip and Polly every chance to succeed in whatever course they decide to pursue. However, in order to keep all those options open, I have to push them towards the highest levels of achievement because once you start slipping, you can’t catch back up. Amy Chua’s girls have too much momentum behind them.
The only way out of this trap is to pursue what Flanagan calls the “Rutgers solution:” decide Polly and Pip will go to a regional or state university, set goals accordingly, and let any other extra stuff come from their interest and their discretion. While this doesn’t actually sound that bad, it essentially precludes the potential of either of them making the leap into greatness, into the realm of the global elite. And that potential, however small, is difficult for me – the product of upwardly mobile parents and weaned on the idea that anyone can become president - to let go of.
There is also one other trap lurking in the background of the choice between the Ivy League track and the Rutgers solution. If we give up the pursuit of grand achievement for my Pip and Polly, if we step out of the market and say no to the competition, how do I measure myself as a parent? When I don’t take my children to music lessons and sports camps and all the things other bourgeoisie children are doing, what metrics do I use to determine whether I am doing a good job? No one counts how many smiles or laughs they had this month. All the benchmarks are out there beyond the walls of my house. Inside, there is only me, Ava, and the kids and whether we feel things are going well or not. And how am I supposed to know what “going well” looks like? Its not like I’ve parented a hundred kids and have a sense of what that is. I have these two. They could be geniuses. They could be idiots. They could be the best kids in the world or the worst. If I don’t send them out there, how will I ever know?
To step out of the hurricane that is the childhood industrial complex is to leave me to my own devices when it comes to evaluation, and that is a position that makes me feel highly vulnerable and exposed. One needs a combination of self-confidence and blissful ignorance not to go completely crazy from the subsequent navel gazing. Unfortunately, that combination is hard to maintain in the face of the constant barrage of experts and products trying to sell me ways to fix any number of possible child-related problems. Our culture pushes parents hard and from many different angles.
*****
In some ways, Chua and the Tiger mothers are taking the easy route. They have picked their goal and are pursuing it with a single-minded fury that allows for no hesitation, no questions, no uncertainty, no doubts. Even as Ava and I rightly decide to go the other way, to value our time as a family over the pulls of the childhood industrial complex, to send our children to whatever university Ava is currently working at, there will always be in my mind the tiny ‘what if,’ the bit of curiosity about whether Polly or Pip could have set the world on fire had they been given the chance.
But this may be one of the most positive developments to come out of Amy Chua entering my life: that doubt is shrinking ever smaller as I see what that other life looks like. It will not ever go away completely, but every time I read something more about Tiger mothers, I become more and more comfortable with the idea that for Polly and Pip – not to mention me and Ava - the Rutgers solution is not a bad way to go.
Showing posts with label notions of childhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label notions of childhood. Show all posts
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Tiger Mothers and their cubs
Three weeks ago the Wall Street Journal published an essay written by Amy Chua, the daughter of Chinese immigrants and a law professor at Yale University, in which she presented her take on the question of why so many children of Chinese immigrants are high achievers in areas like music and math. According to Chua, the key element to the “success” of these children is the strict parenting they receive from their “Tiger Mothers” which she sets in sharp contrast to the permissive approach of “Western” parents. As it is part of a publicity campaign to sell her new memoir about parenting her own children, the essay, entitled ‘Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,’ is written in a tone that is aggressive and intentionally bombastic. It has provoked all kinds of discussion across the internet and blogosphere, to the point where one website self-servingly labeled the essay “The Wall Street Journal’s Most Controversial Article Ever.”
In the essay, Chua lays out what she sees as three principle differences in parenting styles between “Tiger” parents and “Western” parents.
- First, typical Western parents are too concerned with a child’s self-esteem to set high standards and hold the child to them. They accept B’s and C’s on report cards whereas Tiger mothers go ballistic over anything less than A’s.
- Second, Western parents do not teach their children to respect and honor their parents. Tiger mothers demand obedience because they believe their children owe their parents everything.
- Third, Western parents allow their children to think for themselves, to have their own interests, and to have their own friends. Tiger mothers know what activities are best for their children and do not permit them to be distracted by any extracurricular endeavors.
While these three points are the intellectual meat of the essay’s argument, the real hook comes from a fourth proposition that Chua interlaces throughout the text: Tiger cubs succeed because Tiger Mothers are hard on them in ways that Western parents will not or cannot follow. To hammer home this final point, Chua concludes the essay with a story about how she browbeat her younger daughter into successfully learning a particularly difficult piece of music. She relates how she forced her daughter, Louisa, to practice her violin for hours on end – using insults and withholding food at times to keep her from quitting – until Louisa finally managed to master the piece. At the end, Chua depicts Louisa as happy and full of pride at what she was able to accomplish.
While this vignette is supposed to shock and titillate, I find it amusing that it so neatly fits into a narrative that is very familiar to anyone who follows or is involved in sports. The story of the overbearing coach who through vitriol and abuse pushes players (those that are not driven off) to greatness is a regular feature of many sporting seasons. The names are easy to come by in the major sports leagues of the US: Bobby Knight, former basketball coach at the University of Indiana and Texas Tech University; Mike Dikta, former head coach of the Chicago Bears and New Orleans Saints football teams; Bob Huggins, former basketball coach at the University of Cincinnati and current coach at West Virginia University; Bill Parcells, former coach of the New York Giants, New York Jets, New England Patriots, and Dallas Cowboys football teams. All these men used their position of power as coach to frighten, humiliate, and intimidate – essentially to bully - players into doing whatever was demanded of them. Those players who would not comply were run off, traded, or otherwise ostracized.
The violence of the bullying coach carries with it a strange sort of charisma. Many people, especially those who do not experience its full glare, love it. They see nothing wrong with the piles of insults, the mind games, and even the physical abuse exacted on players. They passionately defend the actions of the coach in much the same way that Amy Chua defends hers: they argue that these trials push players to do more than they ever would on their own and in the process they make them immune to the pressure that comes with performing difficult tasks in big moments.
At the same time, there are many other people who view this violence with disgust. They see a coach who is wrapped up in a messianic vision of himself that permits all in the pursuit of victory. They see a person who employs dictatorial violence to create an atmosphere of persistent insecurity and then uses this insecurity to justify and maintain their own authority. They believe that in the process these coaches wind up manipulating and goading players in cruel, unnecessary, and ultimately counterproductive ways (The parallels between these coaches and the personalities involved in promoting the use of torture by the US military and intelligence services are not coincidental).
I am one of these latter people and my answer to the supporters of coaches like Bobby Knight is that the person many consider to be the greatest coach of all time employed a motivational strategy that was the polar opposite of Knight’s bullying violence. John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach of the University of California at Los Angeles, never dipped into the pot of meanness and degradation when dealing with his players (or anyone else). He motivated his players by treating them with respect and intelligence, still demanding the necessary sacrifices of time and energy, but doing so quietly and with obvious purpose. As a result players respected him, not because he demanded it but because he earned it. And for players like Hall of Famer Bill Walton, that respect ultimately became an outright love that lasted far beyond their years playing basketball.
My point here is that I believe the kind of meanness that Amy Chua revels in and celebrates in her WSJ essay as fundamentally important to the success of Tiger cubs is really a self-aggrandizing contingency which is more about maintaining her own power over her children than about facilitating her children’s success. The threats, insults, and abuse she employed – “coercion, Chinese-style” as she puts it – are the blunt instruments of one who does not have the knowledge or confidence to motivate her children in other ways. In my opinion, not only are these tactics counterproductive over the long term – something Chua seems to have encountered with her second child – but they also perpetuate an acceptance of banal violence in society writ large. Violence at this everyday level begets violence at other levels and we become caught in a vicious spiral where dogs eat dogs and “by any means necessary” becomes the only logic anyone understands.
What I find particularly unfortunate about Chua’s gleeful recounting of her insults and abuses is that they overshadow the other significant elements at work in her parenting style. Take a look at these three quotes from her WSJ essay:
- “Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children.”
- “If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.”
- “And it's true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches, putting in long grueling hours personally tutoring, training, interrogating and spying on their kids.”
In Amy Chua’s characterization, the Tiger Mother spends a tremendous amount of time working with and for her children. It is extremely important to recognize this time because it – as opposed to the insults - is the necessary condition for making children successful. For example, holding kids to high standards in school is one thing, but it doesn’t really change anything until someone takes the time to get the practice tests and work through them with a child who is struggling. To take another example, banning television and video games is another ‘strict’ tactic Chua employs. What she doesn’t say is that this choice also requires extra parental time. Not only does it require the parent to avoid the TV (at least while the kids are awake) but it also means there is more time during which the parent will need to engage a child in something else. Those extra half-hours spent reading together, playing games, working on a musical instrument, or just talking add up quickly.
Ultimately, the larger argument that Chua is making in her WSJ article is one that I agree with: the prominence of Tiger cubs in areas like the performance of classical music is not a result of biology or genetics. It is also not the result of some specific cultural aptitude or advantage conveyed by some linguistic difference. This prominence is the product of very focused and determined work which is driven by focused and determined parents.
I also agree with Chua that this reflects a significant difference between Euro-American culture and many other cultures in their dominant notions of what childhood is and should be. In the US, we tend to conceptualize childhood as a time of innocence and play, a time before worry, a time of joy that should be free from the responsibilities and pressures of adulthood. “Play is a child’s work” is the mantra of many a preschool teacher. Kids who don’t get this time, who have to “grow up early,” because a parent dies or a sibling needs extra care are often treated with a kind of sympathy for the presumed bliss they were forced to give up.
As Amy Chua shows, this notion of childhood innocence is not universal. It is the product of a specific set of historical and geographical patterns (largely 19th and 20th century European thought). Recognizing these patterns is not to pass judgment on the wrongness (or rightness) of the ideas themselves. Instead, it merely brings to the fore the fact that there are other ways of thinking about childhood, what children should be doing during this time, and even what constitutes a child.
In the essay, Chua lays out what she sees as three principle differences in parenting styles between “Tiger” parents and “Western” parents.
- First, typical Western parents are too concerned with a child’s self-esteem to set high standards and hold the child to them. They accept B’s and C’s on report cards whereas Tiger mothers go ballistic over anything less than A’s.
- Second, Western parents do not teach their children to respect and honor their parents. Tiger mothers demand obedience because they believe their children owe their parents everything.
- Third, Western parents allow their children to think for themselves, to have their own interests, and to have their own friends. Tiger mothers know what activities are best for their children and do not permit them to be distracted by any extracurricular endeavors.
While these three points are the intellectual meat of the essay’s argument, the real hook comes from a fourth proposition that Chua interlaces throughout the text: Tiger cubs succeed because Tiger Mothers are hard on them in ways that Western parents will not or cannot follow. To hammer home this final point, Chua concludes the essay with a story about how she browbeat her younger daughter into successfully learning a particularly difficult piece of music. She relates how she forced her daughter, Louisa, to practice her violin for hours on end – using insults and withholding food at times to keep her from quitting – until Louisa finally managed to master the piece. At the end, Chua depicts Louisa as happy and full of pride at what she was able to accomplish.
While this vignette is supposed to shock and titillate, I find it amusing that it so neatly fits into a narrative that is very familiar to anyone who follows or is involved in sports. The story of the overbearing coach who through vitriol and abuse pushes players (those that are not driven off) to greatness is a regular feature of many sporting seasons. The names are easy to come by in the major sports leagues of the US: Bobby Knight, former basketball coach at the University of Indiana and Texas Tech University; Mike Dikta, former head coach of the Chicago Bears and New Orleans Saints football teams; Bob Huggins, former basketball coach at the University of Cincinnati and current coach at West Virginia University; Bill Parcells, former coach of the New York Giants, New York Jets, New England Patriots, and Dallas Cowboys football teams. All these men used their position of power as coach to frighten, humiliate, and intimidate – essentially to bully - players into doing whatever was demanded of them. Those players who would not comply were run off, traded, or otherwise ostracized.
The violence of the bullying coach carries with it a strange sort of charisma. Many people, especially those who do not experience its full glare, love it. They see nothing wrong with the piles of insults, the mind games, and even the physical abuse exacted on players. They passionately defend the actions of the coach in much the same way that Amy Chua defends hers: they argue that these trials push players to do more than they ever would on their own and in the process they make them immune to the pressure that comes with performing difficult tasks in big moments.
At the same time, there are many other people who view this violence with disgust. They see a coach who is wrapped up in a messianic vision of himself that permits all in the pursuit of victory. They see a person who employs dictatorial violence to create an atmosphere of persistent insecurity and then uses this insecurity to justify and maintain their own authority. They believe that in the process these coaches wind up manipulating and goading players in cruel, unnecessary, and ultimately counterproductive ways (The parallels between these coaches and the personalities involved in promoting the use of torture by the US military and intelligence services are not coincidental).
I am one of these latter people and my answer to the supporters of coaches like Bobby Knight is that the person many consider to be the greatest coach of all time employed a motivational strategy that was the polar opposite of Knight’s bullying violence. John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach of the University of California at Los Angeles, never dipped into the pot of meanness and degradation when dealing with his players (or anyone else). He motivated his players by treating them with respect and intelligence, still demanding the necessary sacrifices of time and energy, but doing so quietly and with obvious purpose. As a result players respected him, not because he demanded it but because he earned it. And for players like Hall of Famer Bill Walton, that respect ultimately became an outright love that lasted far beyond their years playing basketball.
My point here is that I believe the kind of meanness that Amy Chua revels in and celebrates in her WSJ essay as fundamentally important to the success of Tiger cubs is really a self-aggrandizing contingency which is more about maintaining her own power over her children than about facilitating her children’s success. The threats, insults, and abuse she employed – “coercion, Chinese-style” as she puts it – are the blunt instruments of one who does not have the knowledge or confidence to motivate her children in other ways. In my opinion, not only are these tactics counterproductive over the long term – something Chua seems to have encountered with her second child – but they also perpetuate an acceptance of banal violence in society writ large. Violence at this everyday level begets violence at other levels and we become caught in a vicious spiral where dogs eat dogs and “by any means necessary” becomes the only logic anyone understands.
What I find particularly unfortunate about Chua’s gleeful recounting of her insults and abuses is that they overshadow the other significant elements at work in her parenting style. Take a look at these three quotes from her WSJ essay:
- “Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children.”
- “If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.”
- “And it's true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches, putting in long grueling hours personally tutoring, training, interrogating and spying on their kids.”
In Amy Chua’s characterization, the Tiger Mother spends a tremendous amount of time working with and for her children. It is extremely important to recognize this time because it – as opposed to the insults - is the necessary condition for making children successful. For example, holding kids to high standards in school is one thing, but it doesn’t really change anything until someone takes the time to get the practice tests and work through them with a child who is struggling. To take another example, banning television and video games is another ‘strict’ tactic Chua employs. What she doesn’t say is that this choice also requires extra parental time. Not only does it require the parent to avoid the TV (at least while the kids are awake) but it also means there is more time during which the parent will need to engage a child in something else. Those extra half-hours spent reading together, playing games, working on a musical instrument, or just talking add up quickly.
Ultimately, the larger argument that Chua is making in her WSJ article is one that I agree with: the prominence of Tiger cubs in areas like the performance of classical music is not a result of biology or genetics. It is also not the result of some specific cultural aptitude or advantage conveyed by some linguistic difference. This prominence is the product of very focused and determined work which is driven by focused and determined parents.
I also agree with Chua that this reflects a significant difference between Euro-American culture and many other cultures in their dominant notions of what childhood is and should be. In the US, we tend to conceptualize childhood as a time of innocence and play, a time before worry, a time of joy that should be free from the responsibilities and pressures of adulthood. “Play is a child’s work” is the mantra of many a preschool teacher. Kids who don’t get this time, who have to “grow up early,” because a parent dies or a sibling needs extra care are often treated with a kind of sympathy for the presumed bliss they were forced to give up.
As Amy Chua shows, this notion of childhood innocence is not universal. It is the product of a specific set of historical and geographical patterns (largely 19th and 20th century European thought). Recognizing these patterns is not to pass judgment on the wrongness (or rightness) of the ideas themselves. Instead, it merely brings to the fore the fact that there are other ways of thinking about childhood, what children should be doing during this time, and even what constitutes a child.
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