Why Chinese Mothers are Not Superior (from a female Chinese engineer)
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Re: Why Chinese Mothers are Not Superior (from a female Chinese engineer)
#2I read the original article and honestly couldn't tell if it was a satire or not. I appreciate the honesty of the writer of this blog post though.
Re: Why Chinese Mothers are Not Superior (from a female Chinese engineer)
#3I don't want to start another topic, so I'll leave this - an excellent response from a user on Quora on the topic: http://www.quora.com/Parenting/Is-Amy-Chua-right-when-she-ex...
Re: Why Chinese Mothers are Not Superior (from a female Chinese engineer)
#4Excellent response. Well balanced and honest.
Re: Why Chinese Mothers are Not Superior (from a female Chinese engineer)
#5The point about turning out a generation of clones is spot on, and ultimately the cruelest irony of the whole thing. The best way to get into an elite college is by standing out as an individual; the colleges asian parents desperately want their kids to attend deal with the "asian clone" thing by rejecting the lot of them. The asian kid with a 1560 SAT and state violin awards (probably) isn't getting into Harvard, but if he had substituted kicking field goals for every minute he practiced violin...
Re: Why Chinese Mothers are Not Superior (from a female Chinese engineer)
#6I hope I don't sound too racist or anti-Semite.
Why is it that when a Jewish mother does the same as the Asian mother, no one complains?
I'm a Chinese btw.
Re: Why Chinese Mothers are Not Superior (from a female Chinese engineer)
#7One thing I will grant about the original book and the controversy about it ... whatever the publicist got, was worth it.
Re: Why Chinese Mothers are Not Superior (from a female Chinese engineer)
#8The "Chinese mother" approach to raising children is based around motivations at the second-highest level of Maslow's hierarchy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maslow%27s_Hierarchy_of_Ne...
While this aggressive approach to parenting can be made to sound right on a certain dispassionate level, to some people it just feels intensely wrong in a way that's hard to explain. Why is that?
What happens is that children raised to heavily optimize "Esteem" have a hard time switching gears into "Self-actualization". It's no surprise that the "Chinese mother" disallows her child from starring in the school play. That would be a means of self-expression; it would throw a monkey wrench in the whole works.
I've found many times in life that in order to self-actualize further, I've had to give up things that others praised. I think that in quitting Google and joining a startup (despite her parents' likely disapproval), the author has taken a big step towards self-actualization.
Re: Why Chinese Mothers are Not Superior (from a female Chinese engineer)
#9I hope I don't sound too racist or anti-Semite. Why is it that when a Jewish mother does the same as the Asian mother, no one complains? I'm a Chinese btw.
Downvotes! Care to explain why?
Re: Why Chinese Mothers are Not Superior (from a female Chinese engineer)
#10Extremely well written, and echoes many of the comments in the quora thread (and in my own observations).
There's a logic to it all though, in China for example, there isn't really any reward to be a big risk taker, and the downsides can be huge (social isolation, imprisonment, worse). Success then is to follow directions, do what you are told, and do it with supreme competence.
This is often discussed in terms of the traditional Confucian Academies, and how dedicated studies could lead a peasant into a life of government service and success and pride for his family. But one has to look at what a classical Confucian education entails, literacy for sure -- but it was basically a monumental task of rote memorization. Unfortunately, Chinese parents who try to replicate this on their American born kids are doomed because they haven't quite gotten the message that those things aren't as valued here.