Parental Support

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

You know, the story I’m about to tell you is so alien to me, so foreign and so hard for me to grasp I can’t imagine what it’s like for my roommate. I grew up in a house with a strict but loving and supportive parents, and as long as I didn’t betray their trust they let me run my life. I mean they supported my decisions and were supportive of my failures. But my roommate had an upbringing so different from mine that just boggles my mind.

Let’s call him Tycho, it’s not his name, and though he’s posted this same story on another site’s forums I don’t have his permission to discuss it here, and yet it keeps rolling around in my head and boggling me all over again.

Tycho is about to graduate from GT with a Bachelors in Aerospace Engineering and now the question is where to go for grad school. Princeton rejected him, while both MIT and GT accepted him. His parents want, no need, no direly desire, no dream for him to go to MIT. He however is quite content to stay here at GT.

Tycho’s a 100% chinese american and his family are Chinese immigrants so the “old ways” are firmly entrenched in their life and ways of thought. What the parents want is what happens. Or at least that is how it appears to me, a WASP American.

Tycho was raised in America, he hardly remembers China aside from visits to it. He’s an American teen and he has no ties to the ways of his parents’ generation. I’ve known Tycho since my freshman year and up until the last 18 months a call from his mother put the fear of god in him.

When Princeton rejected him, and he told her, she did not give any support. Her only words were, “I’m disappointed in you, you could have worked harder.” The boy has a 3.8 gpa at GT, as well as an internship with Boeing last summer and so on.

The fact that she offered no comfort blows my mind. I mean totally destroys it in a fiery firework display. My parents have only been supportive in my trials the last year, and they wish I had done better, they never let it get in the way of their love and care for me.

So with the drama over the GT / MIT question we hit a peak this morning with a 2 hour call between him and his parents, which ended with him laughing raucously and basically hanging up on them. Apparently his father said to him, “Son, before I die I want you to do one thing for me, Go to MIT.” After the call he came downstairs and said to me, “You know, I may just have to disown my parents over this.”

I’m not a judgmental person, I work hard to be supportive and a peacemaker but I can only imagine I’m biased in this because his parents seem to be completely unreasonable. They’ve supported him financially up to this point and he’s about to spread his wings and fly on his own, the school will pay him for his research assistantship and he’ll be out from their last hold over on him.

So they have no finances invested in the next school of choice, from my perspective they’ve guided and steered his life this far and they’re trying desperately to extend further and force him down this one path. I can only attribute this to cultural tradition and his being a single child. For me, I was my parent’s 5th child so they were in the routine by the time I came around.

There are more factors which make him choose GT over MIT, something to do with lab setups and assistants at MIT vs GT. I don’t remember all the details but given his engineering background I tend to trust his decision based on facts - lol.

I’ve been completely supportive as have all the other roommates. He isn’t outwardly seeming that depressed or upset over it, he’s focusing on work he has due this week so his mind is kept from thinking about it too long.

So I guess I’m trying to find other perspectives. Is he wrong in ignoring his parents’ wishes at this point? Am I biased? Is he right in picking his own path when it comes to something like this? Any thoughts to add?

2

From what I’ve seen and heard, this is very much a cultural thing and very common. I don’t really understand the dynamic either, having grown up with parents who probably wouldn’t have had any success if they’d tried to run my life (and they didn’t; far from it). Sometimes it’s hard to be respectful of cultural differences when they seem to be hurting someone you care about for what appears to be no good reason to us.

I can only imagine how hard it must be to be the American/Canadian child of immigrant parents. They come from two totally different worlds, and seem to have almost no common frame of reference. Take dating and marriage, for example. Your Canadian-born child is almost guaranteed to date and marry a Canadian person, but to the parents (some, of course, not all), that is a horrible, unthinkable thing. And there’s the whole friends thing, the language thing, the food thing, the school thing, the job thing, often being obviously different from the rest of the people around you; the list just goes on.

I think, maybe, that your roommate’s best resource might be someone who’s gone through a similar situation and understands what to do with it. I don’t think we undertand the dynamic well enough to advise him - my best advice would be do what is continue to be supportive, encourage him to do what’s best for him, and to hell with his unrealistic parents, and that probably isn’t extremely helpful. The one thing I wouldn’t do is criticize his parents to him. They’re still his parents, as unreasonable as they might be.

3

Parents have to love you regardless. Letting them control you just means you may not be able to love yourself.

In the end, everyone is happier if the child does his thing (assuming it is a good thing.)

4

It’s not always cultural (just to throw that in); I knew a guy in college, completely American/white family, his mother made him be a math major instead of the other science-y thing he wanted to do. He was well into his PhD when he blew his top and went to China for two years. He was living with a couple of Chinese students when Tianemen Square happened! Eventually he got back to the US, having acquired quite a bit of Chinese in the process, and changed over to something else. He teaches now.

Anyway, from my American perspective, the guy should do what he feels he should do for his own happiness. From the Chinese family perspective, he should be a dutiful son and do what they want him to do; after all, they just want him to be successful! He’s going to have to make a choice.

Probably they’ll be angry, tell him what an awful son he is for the next few years, and get more cheerful if/when he has some kids of his own. Grandchildren will cover a multitude of sins! (Marriage, not so much.)

5

Quite aside from his parents’ desires, I’d suggest that your roommate consider going to MIT, just so he has a graduate school experience at a different school than the one from which he’s getting the BS degree.