I used to be one of these kids, although my parents are Indian, not Chinese. I was in the high flyer track at one of the upper-tier British public schools (and would have gone on to read classics or some other such useless shit at Cambridge).
When we moved to the US, I made a conscious effort to start having fun. I didn’t go to Cambridge, but I’m a lot happier. Poorer, but happier.
I’d say an A- report card grade counts as reasonably good.
Not everyone is equally good at everything. I worked really hard at Spanish in high school but never got above a B+ because I’m not wired that way. No amount of pushing would make me do well in music - I’m tone deaf. In my senior year when I dropped Spanish for an early computer class (this was 1968, and we programmed in machine language) I went from an 85 to a 98 with less effort.
I took Spanish in junior high also. I took Spanish except for the year I went to Africa since the 3rd grade. Same deal. I suppose if you are a smart kid in a school full of ninnies you should get all As. If you are in a school full of really smart people, it is not so easy. I suspect someone told to get all As or else in junior high or high school is going to have a hard time dealing with Bs in college. I saw plenty of kids who were valedictorians in high school hit the wall when they were in MIT. Thanks to Spanish being valedictorian was not something I had to worry about, which really reduced the stress level. When I was at MIT freshman year was pass/fail, specifically to let kids concentrate on learning and not on grades.
This is what grades are really for - feedback. A lower grade means you need to either work harder, find a way to learn the material better, or do triage on that subject.
That article was an excerpt of her own writing, though. She set herself out as an unshakably confident exemplar of how “Chinese mothers” raise their kids, and why it makes those kids more successful than those raised by Western parenting.
Her purpose was presumably to generate buzz; had she presented the book as just one woman’s musings, she wouldn’t have gotten the same attention. The backlash seems to have been more than she may have expected, and she’s been backpedaling and softening her remarks ever since.
I think you’ve made a very important point: how does one measure success for another person? If many immigrant parents push their children so hard because they want their kids to have a “better” life than they did, these parents must be clear on what “better” means.
The assumption is that “better” means more educated and wealthier. But at what price does “better” come? If the kid ends up miserable working 80+ hours a week at a law firm or a hospital making a six-figure salary that he can never fully enjoy (because he’s working all the time), is that kid’s life a success? Sure, he has money, but maybe he’s constantly fighting the urge to off himself because he really wanted to act or work with animals.
Do most of us end up loving our jobs? No. But I think many of us seek tolerable jobs that let us pay the bills and enjoy our true passions. I don’t believe there is any external meaning to life; I believe that each person has to find that for him/herself. Being educated and rich may be the parents’ idea of success, but it may lead to soul-crushing depression in their kids who view success differently.
IME, if you work at a law firm you are working with animals. 
ETA: and soul-crushing depression is only an issue if you have a soul.
That’s right. I’m used to grade inflation, and from all I know about my kid’s school system, I expect that my kid’s school will have it. I agree that an A SHOULD be extraordinary, and if A’s are only given for extraordinary work, I won’t expect my kid to get them all the time. For example, once she goes to college I would love her to take some hard classes and get some B’s. But so far I am not hopeful about her grade school experience in this regard, although I hope to be proved wrong.
Well, I did say in my original post that someone would have failed. In this case, it is the teacher who has failed, although it would also have been us as parents, because if my child had a teacher like that I would hope that I could change something – either change the teacher, or work with her to actually have her understand the math. Because what is important to me is that she come out actually understanding math. If she’s getting a B in math because her teacher sucks, that’s telling me that something is wrong.
I’m not sure you are understanding what I’m saying, and I apologize for not being clear. I don’t want her to get A’s because A’s are shiny happy letters. I want her to get A’s because I consider that for her situation in her school system anything less represents that she and/or we as parents are not doing our best. If, again, for her situation in her school system a C represented she was doing her best work, then I would be fine with that, but I simply do not think that is going to be the case until at least high school.
I know some kids whose parents are non-rich first generation immigrants. While there is some pressure for them to do well, not at this level. (Burmese parents in this case.)
The kids in the books have two parents both Yale law school professors, so I don’t think doing better than them is the issue. If the kids do nearly as well they’d be better off than most. The parents near me who do pressure their kids are often Silicon Valley executives, living in $million dollar plus houses.
Judging by my son-in-law, the soul is removed slowly but surely during law school. I guess major law firms get rid of any bits of it that are left.
Fair enough. I tend to forget about things like music and art, since these were graded pass/fail when I was growing up (for precisely this reason). I also am not used to school systems that let you take a language before high school. So… I think part of the issue is just that I am used to substandard grade schools? 
If you don’t mind me asking, just because I’m curious (and, hey, you may help my daughter with her crazy mom if it turns out she’s not wired for languages), what sorts of problems did you have in Spanish? Was it problems with grammar, vocabulary, speaking, or something else? Did you have similar problems in English class?
Yeah. I don’t think her school is full of really smart people, that’s the problem, and why I think she should be doing really well grade-wise for now. I do worry about what will happen once she hits that wall and is actually around lots of other smart people – not because I worry about her getting bad grades, but because I remember from experience that there’s a certain amount of painful self-redefinition that takes place when you realize you aren’t as smart as you secretly thought you were.
Yes, this! I’m sorry for not being clear – I have never meant to say that my kid needs to bring home an A or else we’ll yell and scream and throw a tantrum. It’s more that (and, as I’ve said a couple of times, contingent on her school system not being super-difficult or full of really smart people) it’s a feedback signal that something is not right, and if it’s gone a whole semester not being right, that’s a failure on someone’s part (probably mine and my husband’s, potentially hers as well) for not noticing and figuring out what’s going on.
I think this is a fundamental cultural difference, and it’s a tough one to wrap your head around.
In some societies, “success” and even happiness is not defined as personal fulfillment. Now, we have this idea that personally fulfillment is the end-all and be-all hammered into our heads from childhood, so it’s hard for us to picture. But in some places, happiness comes from living and working in harmony as part of a group. Often, your own personal feelings are relatively unimportant, what is important is getting the job done and filling your role well.
If that is hard to picture, imagine yourself on the job. Do you become a “good project manager” by being personally fulfilled? No. Even if you are the happiest project manager in the world, you are going to feel some degree of professional failure if you just aren’t that good at it. A “good project manager” is one who can do what is expected of them (plan projects well) and is considered a valuable and useful part of the company. Your own personal goals are at best an aside to what you can do for the company, and only really matter in as much as they allow you to do your job well.
Communal societies are kind of like that, but all the time. And it’s a totally manageable way to do things. I mean, you don’t spend your whole life crying at work because your feelings aren’t that important, right? You learn to focus on what is important in your context.
Children have a very different place in some societies. In China, there is a popular saying that compares boys and girls to different banks according to the expected return on investment. The first time I heard it, I was appalled. Who could think of their children in terms of expected returns? But that thinking is absolutely a reality. The story for kids in China is that your parents went through the work of raising you, so you’ve got quite a debt to pay when you get older- and you are not going to be in a position to pay that debt if you slack off. In Chinese law, you can get arrested for not taking care of your parents much like you can get arrested here for not paying child support.
Anyway, the point is that the feeling is not that you were put on this Earth to find your own path and happiness in life. You were put here to do a job, to take care of your parents, and to do some honor to the generations that worked hard and got stuff down for thousands of years before you.
(Atandard disclaimer: Obviously not all Chinese people feel this way. I am not an expert of Chinese family relations. China is a big place and things are different everywhere, etc. etc.)
It just never clicked. It was word for word translation, never the concepts. I had exactly the same problem with Hebrew. No problem at all in English - I always got As in the top English classes, and got a near perfect score on the verbal part of the SATs.
I’ve read that a visual memory helps with languages, and I’m lopsidedly verbal. I can rip through Times crossword puzzles, but I am terrible at tavern puzzles which require 3-d visualization. Luckily both kids are good in languages, so I didn’t pass the bad genes on.
This does happen. When our kids were having problems with homework, I sometimes found the teacher was not explaining why certain math procedures worked.
I’m especially sensitive to this because my oldest kid drives herself mercilessly, but will accuse me, especially, of forcing her to work even though I’ve never said anything.
I don’t know which culture you think has personal fulfillment as the be-all and end-all, but it sure isn’t ours. Not with commercials trying to get us the next luxury car and our idols making tons of money. There is a countervailing movement saying that just being financially successful isn’t the best thing either.
As for your example, I can’t imagine a person who is incompetent at something being happy doing it. If you are good at it, I think a person who enjoys it will always do it better than a person who hates doing it, even if they are good at it. They will think about it even off work, for one thing.
I think the bigger cultural difference lies in the weight given to talent or ability. IME, American parents are much quicker to accept that a child isn’t good in music, or math, or foreign languages, or whatever, whereas the immigrant parent is more likely to assume that a lack of mastery indicates a lack of effort.
I think there’s something to be said for both worldviews: lots of kids sell them short permanently when they decide they just aren’t good at X, and stop trying. The fact that you get to stop trying is a powerful reinforcement of this sort of helpless attitude. On the other hand, as a teacher I have seen kids punished for not achieving at what I really felt was beyond their capacity. There’s something to be said for playing the game of life with the hand you’re dealt.
And yet it hasn’t gotten very far outside your area. Caring about whether hardass parenting might make kids resentful or neurotic isn’t real sexy right now. It’s much more the thing to talk about discipline and results and stuff.
That suggests to me that people who parent that way are doing it more for their own sake than for the child’s - or at best, they care more about the child fitting into their view of society than about the wellbeing of the child as a person.
It’s all over the NY Times and the excerpt creating the fuss was in the Wall Street Journal.
The rebellion and subsequent backing-off, I meant. That’s what no one wants to deal with.
I’ll add that this book, and commentary from columnists, was also featured in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. It would seem to me that “it” has gone well beyond a single SDMB poster’s area.
She was on Colbert tonight, and he made a little joke about her back pedaling. Now she’s saying the book is satiric. I can’t say, not having read it, but a book that provides a point of view seriously then turns comic in the last ten pages isn’t a satire.
What I don’t get is the emphasis on classical music. I love classical music but it’s a pretty arcane niche artform. Who cares if your kids master it? “If my children can’t scrimshaw properly I shall thrash them to an inch of their lives!”
High prestige and highly respectable. Little Jewish kids from families with money did it also 80 years ago. My father took violin when his family was rich in the mid 1920s.