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<p>I don’t think this was implied and I would much rather take this as a measure of good parenting.</p>
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It is not supposed to be a competitive sport. It is supposed to be an art. The quality and cohesiveness of the ensemble is every bit as important as the ability of the soloists, perhaps more so, because while a soloist can cover for an error (doing one pirouette instead of three, or a chaines turn rather than a pirouette – the corps dancers rarely have that luxury – they need to dance well, and keep their moves coordinated with the other dancers. </p>
<p>Yes, there is competition for parts and it feels good to get selected for a coveted role, but anyone who cares about the overall quality of the performance doesn’t want to see someone cast in a part if they lack the skill to carry it off. I don’t think my d. would have wanted to be cast in a part that was too difficult for her – and it was very obvious through the years which students were the most able dancers in any group. It was often quite obvious in an audition who deserved a particular part – a good dancer should be able to look around and recognize stellar talent around her. </p>
<p>My d. had many wonderful opportunities as a dancer. She competed with a group of about 7 dancers that was one of the top 3 ensemble groups at a national competition – and it was o.k. that she was not the lead dancer. She danced on the same stage with professional adult dancers, including dancers from ABT. She didn’t have to be the #1 best-in-show to get there - she just had to dance well enough to support the others. It did help that she was a quick study and learned her parts well, so she was an asset to any ensemble – she wasn’t going to mess up or show up to a rehearsal not knowing the steps. </p>
<p>If I was teaching dance – or if I was a professional choreographer – I would be very wary of the cutthroat types. I’ve seen already as an observer that they (and their parents) are not very strong on the idea of group loyalty, and they will let the others down in a crunch. They will argue with the choreographer and other dancers, or fail to show up for rehearsal, or leave a production at the last minute because of some other opportunity that has arisen. </p>
<p>I think that dance is an art where it is particularly important for an individual to be able to see themselves as part of a group, and to maintain awareness of the cohesiveness and quality of the group-- orchestral music or a participation in a choir would be the same. </p>
<p>Yes it is “character building” – but the “character” that needs to be built is the ability to appreciate that the self is not always going to be #1, and to recognize, support and work with the ensemble.</p>
<p>Oldfort basically has the view that the only terms of success are IB, international finance, consulting and law or whatever, and in the context of that, if you don’t have a ton of EC’s, 2200+ SAT’s, 4.0 gpa, get into a HYP school then into harvard business/wharton/yale law/et al, your life is over <em>sigh</em>. Yes, IB and white shoe law schools and international consulting are the last vestiges of the old boy network, even if it isn’t the wasp network it once was. The concept is the same, in the old days, it was if someone came from ‘the right family’, ‘the right background’, these days it is coming from ‘the right school’ with the ‘right creds’, it is the same attitude, and bred by the same thing. Those hiring were hired like that, and they really believe that makes them better, and go ahead and do the same thing.</p>
<p>Trading was once like that, in the old days of the NYSE and the blue bloods who controlled the exchange and the trading firms, it was much the same, the whitneys and their like controlled it and so forth. People outside that challenged it, firms sued and broke the monopoly that was full service brokerage, and technical geniuses created the electronic markets that put the final nail in the coffin of that. Today trading is driven by trading by complicated algorithms, the land of quants, and with that, it is all about how good someone is, you don’t have to come from HYP to be one of those, and they are the rocket scientists of the area…</p>
<p>The other thing that is interesting with the focus on GPA, and that is something about how someone got that. Did they get that by being good students, truly learning, or did they get it by grinding through, sucking up to professors, by any means; did they take courses because they were curious about them, or did they take them because they were easy and would help boost the gpa? Did they do activities because they cared about them, or because they looked good on a CV? You can get a good GPA by grinding your way through, gaming the system, by spitting back what professors want on a test, etc and have very little skills in creativity or innovation. There was a study recently, by the ‘sainted’ Mckimsey and company, that said that 1 in 10 graduates of Chinese universities had the skillset to work in a corporation, and according to an op ed in the Times, written by Asian professors, the problem is exactly what I am talking about, that the education is all about grades and scores on tests, the students lack a lot of the other things you need in the work world.</p>
<p>The other interesting part about GPA is that there are negative correlations between high GPA and work performance, that often the 4.0’s don’t do as well as might be expected. The studies I read in grad school said the reasons were mixed, but the two dominant ones were 1)that the way the kids got the 4.0 didn’t give good skillsets for work and 2)that having the 4.0 from the HYP, the student can have an attitude problem, like everyone owes them that up in 6 figure job and they are so superior it should be obvious, and even in the rarified precincts of IB and such, that isn’t going to fly well. </p>
<p>Wildwood, in terms of raising kids there is no doubt that very young kids demand a stronger level of control then older kids, that pyramid refers to that. However, there is a big difference from the kind of control that they are talkjing about and what Chua did. Obviously, young kids have limited range in what they can choose, a lot is on the parents. However, that doesn’t mean the parent has to control everything, either, and I doubt the person who coined that pyramid would say Chua was what she thought was right. The basic answer is to allow kids lattitude where it is safe to do so, and control the rest, and over time the part that is the child as they gain experience and knowledge grows while the parent pulls back. Chua doesn’t do that, she basically gives the kids very few choices and that doesn’t change, she dominated their life all the way through as if they were a 2 year old, that isn’t the same thing.</p>
<p>I see this in music all the time. When kids start out, as you and others have pointed out, parents have to be involved. In suzuki, parents take the notes and help the kid practice, and in early years parents may have to prod the kid to study and so forth. That is a natural progression, but over time that should change, the student, if serious, has to take that on themselves…but the Chua types don’t understand that. Put it this way, among the kids at the high school level who are serious about going into music, the parents role generally comes down to paying tuition and driving them around, in terms of things like repertoire and how to play and take notes and such, it is between the student and the teacher, as it should be. Yet there are a lot of Chua types, you see kids in their mid to late teens, high level players, where their parents sit in every lesson , they argue with the teacher, they demand the kid play some ‘better’ piece of the repertoire, they basically guide every little thing. If they decide a kid should do a competition that the teacher thinks isn’t worth it for the student, the parents win. If the kid decides that a competition is wrong for them, forget it, parent knows best, which is kind of ridiculous because these parents know less about music then I do, and I admittedly am no expert.</p>
<p>My father once said something that is very true, we cannot live our lives for our kids, we can’t take the falls for them or be there always to pick up the pieces, not should we, that is part of the process. If the kid tries something and isn’t good at it, they had the experience of realizing that life isn’t always successful, nor can we be good at everything. How will her kids feel when they run into kids who could be 10 times more brilliant then they are? How will they deal with the kind of frustrations that happen when you can’t solve something by horsing your way through it, or you realize you simply aren’t good at something? If you have had a life where everything is guided to areas where you can succeed by grunting your way through it, what happens when you face things that require intuition and thinking ‘outside the box’? When you grow up with the idea that failure in anything is a tragedy, how the hell do you find out how to deal with it, failure is part of life. What happens if you are the lawyer, and get your tail kicked in court? What happens when your approach to learning stuff doesn’t work in a class that requires different methods? What happens when you have to deal with people who think differently then you do? These are things where kids who have had lattitude to deal with their own path are going to have an advantage, because frankly the road to success in life is not the same as school or getting good grades…and by the time they hit college, kids raised like Chua is doing are going to have a rough adjustment.</p>
<p>Like I said, I would love for someone to do a longitudinal study on kids raised this way, what happens to them, what do they end up doing? In the end, the proof is in the pudding.</p>
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<p>Well, the first things that came blazing into my mind were producing children who are happy, able to form loving and fulfilling relationships and a comfortable place for themselves in the world. I didn’t see any of these things addressed in the discussions about Chua’s parenting methods.</p>
<p>Agree with Bay. I am going for the eventual development of an adult who is loving, kind, happy, thoughtful, empathetic, principled, and courageous.</p>
<p>wildwood said:</p>
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<p>I’m a big fan of longitudinal studies. For any old enough schools, e.g., Harvard, why a student was admitted and how s/he turned out 10, 20, or even 50 years later could be analyzed in details. I guess the schools don’t want to share the results.</p>
<p>It is ironic that my soon to finish college daughter chided me for not raising her with more goal-oriented approaches "</p>
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<p>Well, by those standards, Chua doesn’t seem to be doing that badly either:</p>
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<p>Now to be fair, this was in the context of Lulu rebelling at home and complaining she didn’t have any friends because she never got to do anything. Chua was showing the contrast between behavior at home and at school, a phenomenon I’m sure many of us are familiar with.</p>
<p>Btw, I think it is an exaggeration to say the girls had no social life. It was quite limited but it’s clear they had birthday parties and so were probably allowed to attend others. Chua allowed Sophia to attend one sleepover against her better judgement, and she felt it was a failure, both because of the nasty girl environment that Sophia apparently described to her, and because Sophia came back exhausted and crabby and it wasted the day.</p>
<p>My girls had plenty of sleepovers, away and at our house, but I totally understand about the after-effects and can respect Chua’s position. (I think an alternative would have been to pick them up late in the evening–I knew some parents who did that because their kids didn’t want to sleep away from home.)</p>
<p>Wildwood—Well, I had anorexia for five years when I was a teenager, and I have to say it did have something to do with parenting: My mom was very controlling, and that is a classic scenario for anorectic girls. (Refusing to eat = the only way the high-achieving, driven teenage girl can effectively rebel against the controlling mother.) But, then, it sounds as if Chua was pretty darned controlling, too. (Haven’t read the book and don’t particularly want to; my values are radically different from Chua’s, it seems.)</p>
<p>But, while anorexia is connected with parenting, it is also a form of OCD – and OCD is very much genetic and neuro-physiological. (It’s related to an imbalance of serotonin.) </p>
<p>So, if Chua’s daughters did not develop eating disorders such as anorexia, it may not prove that they were parented well. It may simply mean that they did not have the serotonin imbalance that would predispose them to rebel against their controlling mother in that particular OCD-ish way.</p>
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<p>It’s great that the daughter was viewed by teachers / classmates as being compassionate, because I don’t see a heck of a lot of compassion being modeled by their mother. How can you not have compassion towards an exhausted 7 yo whose mother is yelling at her to perfect some stupid piano piece NOW, and too bad if you haven’t had dinner?</p>
<p>Chua may be a bit of a hardass, but holy crappola, is it ever obvious that she cares for her kids.</p>
<p>She cares about outside measures of achievement, sure. It would be interesting to see how much she cared if one of them decided she wanted to, for example, open her own bakery, or work for the National Park Service, or become a physical therapist.</p>
<p>Saying to your kid “Hey, fatty, time to lose some weight” seems to be wrong REGARDLESS of whether the kid develops a complex or psychiatric disorder as a result. Can’t some things just be wrong even if there are no adverse effects on a given individual?</p>
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<p>A good friend of mine was anorexic as a teenager, and still has eating disorder issues to this day. She did not have controlling parents at all, but they did think she could do no wrong and she was/is a perfectionist, which I understand is common in anorexics. She was slightly chubby growing up and it seems she couldn’t handle not being perfect in every way. I do know anorexia is a lot about control but she is not OCD. I’m sure there are some cases that stem from a chemical imbalance, just like with depression. But I doubt that accounts for most. The point is there are probably many paths to anorexia but I’d say all of them start with an unhealthy self-concept.</p>
<p>I imagine there is a difference between controlling parents who never show much love to their kids, and those who control a lot of aspects of their children’s lives but also praise an appreciate them, like Chua. There are also parents who are very controlling about some things, but not at all about others (I think I fall into this group). And we actually don’t know much about the degree of intellectual freedom that Chua gave the girls.</p>
<p>If Chua were just controlling but praising and appreciative, that would be one thing. Haven’t you seen other passages in the book (beyond the donkey-piece piano incident) where she gives rather mean criticism of her kids in many areas whenever they aren’t perfect at something? This isn’t just a one-time went-off-the-deep-end type of thing here.</p>
<p>I think we have to be careful about something, I think it would be a big stretch to say that chua didn’t care for or love her kids, whatever her methods may or may not be. I have problems with her approach but I don’t question her or most other parents motives, most of them love their kids and feel they are doing the best for them. A parent who didn’t love their kid wouldn’t even care about success, they wouldn’t even care that the kids do well in life or whatever, so I don’t think that is involved here.</p>
<p>There is also something else here people are leaving out,which is amazing,and that is that the girls have two parents, and that can make a difference, too. Their dad might be the balance against what Chua is doing, whereas, for example, she seems to preach the doctrine of being #1 in all things, that her daughters are in effect in a competition with everyone else, and so forth, they also have a dad who could be teaching them the other things. While you can argue that with a strong parent like Chua that she would dominate, but while mom might make clear that if they don’t do things perfectly it isn’t good enough, the dad might be one to give praise for simply trying, or might teach/emphasize things like empathy that Chua may or may not do.</p>
<p>I met a boy through my son being involved in music, whose mom was very much like Chua, constantly pushing him to the brink, forcing him ahead on math and science, pushing him into music competitions and the like (btw, a woman with serious issues, I wouldn’t doubt she would be the type of mother I have heard about, who during auditions or a competition would be looking for way to sabotage a fellow competitor, including damaging their instrument),but despite a mother like that he is a nice kid, he is pretty easygoing otherwise and the other kids in the program really like him (as opposed to some other kids who were carbon copies of their parents, nasty little buggers). His dad apparently is very easygoing and has spent a lot of time tempering what the mom does. </p>
<p>The other thing to keep in mind is that we don’t know how Chua herself acts around other people, how outside the mania for her daughters to succeed, how she is. Kids are funny, they tend to pick up a lot more from the way we act, from signals they pick up, rather then what they are taught. Thus is Chua herself, despite firing up her kids that they need to be #1 in everything and so forth, empathetic towards others, does she get along with other people well, does she treat colleagues as colleagues, or enemies to be climbed over? Friend of mine that is a therapist said that kids pick up things more from the environment, what she calls ‘caught not taught’, and I tend to agree with that. Could be that what she writes in the book and the way she is with the world are very different things; as i noted above, there are parents like the mom I mentioned above you wouldn’t want to go near without a baseball bat in case she attacked you, there also are strict parents who otherwise model good behavior towards others. </p>
<p>Obviously I don’t approve of her mindset or actions in many cases, I don’t believe ridicule is an appropriate way to modify behavior nor do I think you need to strongarm kids to success like they live in a gulag, but how kids turn out is a complicated thing. On the other hand, Chua’s methods are kind of like someone taking the gas tank out of a car and using a blowtorch to solder a leaky seem without blowing the tank out or taking other precautions, sometimes it works great, other times it can blow up in your face, and I suspect with her methods it blows up more then rarely…</p>
<p>Calmon wrote:</p>
<p>“It is not supposed to be a competitive sport. It is supposed to be an art”</p>
<p>Bingo, exactly. Ballet is very much like music, these days it takes a very strong commitment early and is a tough, tough path (there is a wonderful documentary out there, I think netflix has it, about dancers auditioning for the Kirov in Russia at the Marinsky theater, unreal). The reality is it is an art form, and while to make it you are competing against other people, since only a few make it, the path there and beyond is not an individual sport. Ballet dancers like musicians don’t exist in a vacuum, and the idea that if they win I lose works contrary to the very nature of an art. While obviously not everyone makes it as a soloist or even in the corps de ballet, the major part about being a ballet dancer or musician is working to express the art, it is about being good enough to express it, and if what you do attracts the attention of a ballet company as a member or soloist, that is great, but the answer is within, not looking at others.</p>
<p>People love to cite “The Black Swan”, but what they leave out is that is a melodrama. Yeah, there are dancers who are cutthroat, who do everything they can to undercut others, but they are not the majority, and many of them, unless incredibly gifted, have short lives as professionals, it gets around and choreographers and fellow dancers and managers won’t put up with them. </p>
<p>In music, this is known as the ‘me,too’ syndrome, and what you get are people who see it as a competitive sport, and go into it with that in mind. So, for example, instead of developing their own artistry, instead of developing both a strong technical base and musical interpretation and knowledge, like in Chua’s approach they focus on grinding through to achieve virtuostic technic and fireworks, which does win the one aspect of music where it applies, competitions (very few competitions, other then some high level ones, put much emphasis on artistry or musical expression, it is mostly about intonation and technical aspects like rhythm and dynamics, which are a lot easier to listen for or rate then artistry). More importantly, when you make it a sport, where someone ‘wins’ and someone ‘loses’ you see others as opponents, not colleagues to share the love of music with, they are someone to be ‘beaten’. </p>
<p>Want to know what comes out of that? Someone who can perform at a high technical level, but has very little artistry (and yeah, there are kids like this in ballet school, some of the Chua mom types exist in that world, and it shows from what I hear, have talked to parents with kids in programs like ABT and SAB). In music, they are notorious, kids who can win competitions and no one would ever want to watch them play…more importantly, few want to play with them because they have the attitude that others are their enemy and so forth. </p>
<p>Funny with the sports analogy, reminds me of a favorite movie of mine, “Mr. 3000” where an arrogant SOB, who no one likes, retires from baseball because he has made his goal, the 3000 hits he thinks will get him into the hall of fame, finds out a couple of the hits have been ruled invalid, then decides to come back…and learns something about what the game is, and ends up making the hall of fame because he learns that it isn’t an individual competition ( If you haven’t seen it, it is worth renting/streaming, rest in peace Bernie Mac, you hit this one out of the park)</p>
<p>With the music kids, it is very much like the character in the movie, kids who have been brought up like that come out of music school and find it is a cruel world (this I have gotten from working musicians, who both perform and teach at music schools at all levels), because no one wants to play with them because of their attitude that everything is me versus them. One person we know, who is associated with a well known conservatory, said that a lot of the students they admitted came from this kind of background and mentality (a combination of their attitude, and also the way they were taught) and that it wasn’t working all that well, that they were finding these students did make for very good musicians in practice.</p>
<p>Re post #1472: Chua is heavily involved with her kids, but it doesn’t seem that she is able to separate her own needs and desires from theirs. That is, she appears to be over-invested in them, seeing them as an extension of herself rather than as separate and unique individuals.</p>
<p>This is not uncommon, but it is not good parenting because in the end, the parent’s needs come first. The parent may think that she is putting the children’s needs as a top priority, but if she sees her kids only as a reflection of herself, she simply will not be aware of what those needs are. </p>
<p>I think that in order to truly <em>care</em> about someone one else, you have to develop the ability to acknowledge and understand their different point of view. My daughter and son are different individuals than I am – they have different personalities and goals, a different set of experiences and understanding of the world. While as a parent I certainly wanted to be part of their world and to be a positive influence – I also showed them how much I “cared” about them by sometimes following their lead, taking an interest in what was important to them at the time. The parent who attends every basketball game or dance recital, even though they don’t like sports or ballet, are showing that type of “caring” – that is, “I am not into X, but I will support YOU in doing X, because I care about YOU.” </p>
<p>Every single time that Chua (or any other parent) says to a kid you can’t do X (something the kid wants), because you have to do Y (something the parent wants) instead, the parent is showing that they don’t care. Now parents do that all the time as part of their parental role: “no, you can’t play videogames, because you have to work on your math homework instead” – but most of us also strive for balance and have a very broad range of what activities and interests our kids can pursue, as well as a willingness to let the balance of control shift toward the child as the child matures and demonstrates that “our” stuff (chores, schoolwork, etc.) is being managed.</p>
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<p>Well said. She didn’t seem to comprehend or care, for example, that Lulu returned home from a tennis tournament with delight in her eyes, a spring in her step, etc. All she could think about was - Lulu had only beaten the girl who was #10,000 in the Connecticut rankings. It didn’t even <em>occur</em> to her to look at Lulu’s happy face and think, “Wow, good for her, she’s proud of her accomplishment.” It didn’t make HER (Amy’s) accomplishment radar, so therefore it could never be worthwhile. The book always comes back to what SHE thinks of her kids’ activities and accomplishments. So, yes, in an abstract way, she cares about them – about their <em>success</em> (in the little narrow world that says that piano / violin / Ivy League schools = the only measures of success). Of course she loves them, but it’s not compassionate love.</p>