Last Saturday night, somebody stole our cellphone. It was a petty crime. There was no damage or injuries. Due to a change in our regular routine and some distracted carelessness on my part, the thief had an easy grab and walk away situation.
That afternoon I had taken the kids with me to pick up Ava from the airport. After confirming that she was waiting for us in the pick-up area, I put our cellphone down in a cupholder on the center console of the car. We picked Ava up and made our way home. During this time, some new neighbors were moving into the apartment above us. When we got home, their moving van was blocking the driveway. So, I parked on the street. Then, when I got the kids out of the car, Polly started heading for the truck. I hurried over to keep her from getting in the way and, in the process, failed to lock the doors on the car.
The next morning when we went looking for the phone, it was gone. At first we thought it was just lost. But after calling the phone and having it send us straight to voice mail – an indication that the phone had been turned off by someone – we understood what had really happened. During the night, someone saw the phone sitting there in the unlocked car and took the opportunity to snatch it.
After this realization set in, I spent the next couple of hours drifting around the house in a pool of impotence and frustration. While it was not my fault per se that someone stole our phone, my actions were the ones that had created the possibility. Now, all I could do about that was to file a police report and try to get over it. There was no other action to take; no way to save the day or repair the damage. I had to just sit there, chew up my mistake, swallow my ire, and push all the frustration of the morning out through the other end.
This digestion was not easy to take. But in the process, I did have two experiences that gave me a bit more insight into the dynamics that shape families in crisis.
The first showed me how easy it is for kids to become victims in this kind of situation. The second made me wonder about what trials may lie ahead for full-time fathers as our numbers continue to increase.
*****
Pip is a curious and inquisitive four-year-old. He wants to be included in everything his parents are doing and wants to understand everything we are talking about. His pursuit of this understanding is persistent and determined. He will ask questions and ask questions and then ask some more. Then he will return to the same questions again to see if the answers are different the second, third, or fourth time he asks them. From a distance it is a very impressive operation. When you are in the middle of it, it can be overwhelming.
So, as I was stewing over the stolen phone, Pip was plugging away with questions. Ava provided some buffer for a while, but eventually Pip made it over to me. His questions were the ones you would expect a four-year-old ask:
What happened to our phone? Why? What are you going to do? Where is the phone now? Are we going to get the phone back? Why are you filing a police report? What will the police do? Why did someone take our phone? What are they going to do with it?
They were the basic questions of a child trying to make sense of something that had never happened before. And yet, in my state of frustration, each question felt like a small accusation. After a while all I could hear was: Why did you not lock the door, Daddy? Why did you forget to lock the door, Daddy? How come the door was not locked, Daddy? It was like a mosquito biting me over and over, and I had to fight with myself not to lash out at him.
A couple of times I could feel my patience cracking. In those moments all I wanted to do was angrily hiss “Leave me alone.” This little outburst would have stopped him in a hurry and more than likely brought on a few tears. It would have sent him off to his mother or the couch or some other safe place until I was ready to deal with him.
While this is not the parent I want to be nor the model of what I want Pip to do in a similar situation, in that moment of frustration and anger, there was something very satisfying about playing through such a scenario. It would have demonstrated (to whom? I don’t know) that I still had power over something, that I was not helpless in the face of the world’s randomness. It would have given me a chance to regain some feeling of control over everything that was going on around me. It would have eased my pain by spreading it around to others.
It also would have been wrong. In thinking about that rush of feelings later in the evening, I began to recognize in a more substantial way how truly vulnerable kids are when the crises of life hit their families. Given their position as dependents in the family structure, kids become ready targets when the adults who are supposed to care for them are feeling powerless and out of control. In many respects it doesn’t matter what the kids do or don’t do. In the moment of abuse, it’s a question of relationships and the desire by the abuser to re-activate a hierarchy of power. It’s why people who abuse animals are also more likely than others to abuse their children and their spouses. The actual being suffering the abuse doesn’t matter. Its all about where they reside in the hierarchy.
What amazes me is that while I know all of this, the boundaries between the person I want to be and the person I abhor are shockingly thin. When the emotions generated by someone stealing our lousy cellphone can send me hurtling into a position where I had to struggle mightily to remain civil with Pip, it makes me wonder. Is this flimsy restraint all that separates me from the abusers of the world, the kickers of dogs, the beaters of women and children? I scares me some to think that such may be the case.
*****
The other understanding that came to mind as I worked through my frustration and disposed of my anger has to do with some of the undermentioned vulnerabilities that come with being a full-time father.
As I said above, while having the cellphone stolen was not really my fault, my actions were the ones that made it possible. The financial loss involved is not horrendous – about $200 – but it hurts nonetheless. This is particularly true right now as we are coming to terms with the fact that we are going to take a $30,000 - $50,000 bath on a house we bought for $150,000 five years ago. In light of this, even the waste of a dollar on something we could have gotten cheaper elsewhere brings a certain amount of anguish.
For me, this anguish is intensified because I do not bring in any income to our family coffers. In a previous life, I could make the claim that I would pay for the phone myself, thereby taking – at least in my mind - the financial hit fully on my shoulders. Then I could go to work and earn more money to pay for a new one. Now, I have to find other ways to expiate my sin. This usually means being extra conscientious about taking care of things around the house. These are things that I would be doing anyway, but in the wake of this kind of mistake, I feel the need to do them with an extra bit of hustle and attention. In this way I feel like I am demonstrating to Ava both how sorry I am that I messed up and how useful I am to keep around.
It comes back again to a question of power. In a single income family, there exists an often unstated imbalance of power. Ava has a job. She brings money into our household. I do not have a job. I send money out of our household. In this simple flow diagram, Ava can do without me. I cannot do without her.
Even more critically, if our relationship were to deteriorate to a point where we wound up separating, I would have a very difficult time getting a job. I have been out of the workforce for four years and counting. My credentials are aging and my resume shows no development of job-related skills. My local contacts are mostly other full-time parents. In order to become employable again, I would probably have to go back to school and take whatever part-time or menial job I could get in the meantime.
This all means that I feel a certain extra pressure to make sure my relationship with Ava works. While this pressure is not something that matters on an everyday level, when something goes wrong because of my choices or actions, I want to make sure that Ava knows that I am doing what needs to be done to address the problem. This is something I want to do anyway because its how a good team handles problems, but I also can’t ignore the reality that my financial dependency on Ava exerts a subtle push on my attitude and choices.
This kind of push and the other ramifications of such an imbalance in financial status are a familiar experience for many women. The choice made by many battered women to stay with their abusers is just one example of the power this imbalance exerts. But I’m not sure that men like me who are acting as the primary care-giver in a family are as cognizant of their vulnerabilities. It’s just not something that we have seen before. However, as the number of men becoming full-time fathers increases, should we expect to see the emergence of a population of men who, in the wake of divorce, struggle to maintain the lives they once enjoyed? Or is there something in the current order of things that will make the experiences of these men different from those of full-time mothers who after divorce suffer substantial rates of poverty? I don’t know the answer to this, but I imagine that we are going to eventually find out.
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Friday, April 8, 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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)