<p>Brooklynborndad - my post never said that if someone was not as directive as me then he/she is not supportive of his/her child. I am just offering a different perspective to show even if I was very directive, my kids are ok with it because of our relationship.</p>
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<p>and the wonderful thing about the unschoolers I know is that they are equally proud and satisfied with children at HYP or working in the bicycle shop. 
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<p>And sometimes an artist is gonna need that day job, although that, too, is sort of a value judgment on my part. :(</p>
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<p>Busted!! I know almost nothing about opera and don’t care for it much. However, one of my children, interested in dragons, read the Nibelungenlied at around age ten, in translation at that point in time. That led him to Wagner. One of his dreams is to see the whole Cycle at one of those festivals. In spite of having stopped music lessons. He’s all grown up now.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?pagewanted=2[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?pagewanted=2</a></p>
<p>The Case for Working with your Hands
motorcycles not bicycles :)</p>
<p>wagner</p>
<p>2 second synopsis: The ring cycle is all about rebellion against authority, love over law, etc, etc. </p>
<p>bike shop - Im not real sure the bike shop outcome is really what was best for the kid in question. Im trying to put it nicely. And IIUC, the financial returns to working in a bike shop are seriously behind those working on motorcycles or cars. If you start your own bike shop it may not be that bad. I think, when it came down to it, his choices were severely constrained by the way unschooling worked out for him (his parents may not share my evaluation of different life chances, of course)</p>
<p>“Brooklynborndad - my post never said that if someone was not as directive as me then he/she is not supportive of his/her child. I am just offering a different perspective to show even if I was very directive, my kids are ok with it because of our relationship”</p>
<p>well I misread it then, I am sorry. </p>
<p>I guess i am also uncomfortable with the apparent assumption that directive and high achievement oriented are the same.</p>
<p>there seems to be an assumption that kids are lazy, and that parents correction of their kids choices is always in the direction of doing more. There are ALSO kids who are ambitious, but poor in judgement, and who bite off more than they can chew. In those cases being directive will mean PRECISELY directing them to walk away from certain things. That kids are naturally ambitious, naturally inclined to learn, naturally inclined to DO, seems ruled out by a certain mind set. In the west I would associate that with the Augustinian/Calvinist view of fallen man and original sin. I do not chinese philosophy well enough to discern how that fits in an east asian context. </p>
<p>I am not a blind follower of Rousseau, but I see empirical evidence that the “natural laziness requiring authority” assumption is false, at least for many individuals.</p>
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<p>I agree. The first passage presupposes that once a goal, always a goal. Sometimes it’s ok to change / modify your goals. In fact, quite often in life it’s ok to change /modify your goals. Knowing how to reprioritize when things change is a very useful life skill.</p>
<p>@Brooklynborndad: My spouse is the opera aficionado, and not I, but I have picked up enough that I found your post #1511 hilarious!</p>
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<p>How much would you have forced your kids to continue with ballet IF they had hated it? Would they be able to express that they hated it? See, that’s the thing with Chua. It made absolutely no difference to her whether the kids loved piano / violin or hated it. None whatsoever. The goal was the goal, and it was written in stone. The goal was arbitrary. Completely arbitrary.</p>
<p>so sorry Brooklynborndad,
finally got it! -
and now exposed as both ignorant and b***y
and perhaps a really good example of why child-led learning was better for our family :)</p>
<p>Oldfort-</p>
<p>I haven’t heard anyone on here claim that their parenting is superior, that because they did x, their kid did Y, that it is the only way to do things, not sure where you are getting that. I don’t think the people posting are holier then thou, it is more like they are commenting on what Chua put out there and what has been portrayed as being “superior” parenting. Chua wrote the book, she has been all over the place, and it is getting serious play as being a ‘superior’ method of parenting based on what her kids supposedly have done.</p>
<p>I also find your arguments puzzling, because what you are leaving out is not that directed parenting per se is bad, but that the criticism on here is the level she took it to, where everything was parent directed. When you D’s did ballet, did you or your spouse tell them to do it, or did you tell them “I don’t want you doing it, because it isn’t valuable”…you didn’t obviously, nor did you sit there and say “you know, you shouldn’t do ballet, because there is no way you can be prima ballerina, so don’t do it”. Instead you let them do it, and then gave them the push that if they were going to do it, they had to try, put the effort in, big difference. </p>
<p>You said you could have gotten your D an internship but she turned it down and did something on her own, how come you didn’t force her to take the internship you could get? The point being, that you may have been very involved in what they did, and demanded a level of excellence or trying, but that is not the same thing as what Chua did, you didn’t force your will on everything the way Chua did (sorry, choosing Piano or Violin is not giving the kids an option)</p>
<p>The big difference between her and what you probably did was you didn’t shape their life where there was some arbitrary idea of success, nor did you guide every step as she did. What you did was demand that if they did something, they work at it, even if it was hard, that hitting a brick wall and giving up is not a good thing to do, and I would be the first one to agree. My spouse and I are not directing parents, but when our son started music we made it clear that at some point if he decided it was something he didn’t want to do, that it would be okay if he wanted to drop it at some point. However, We also told him that we wouldn’t let him drop it because he was frustrated with something, that if we sensed that rather then not wanting to play, he wanted to give up because something was frustrating him that was a no no. To make doubly sure, we told him that if he did decide to quit, he needed to finish up the current cycle through recital and then we would talk about it, to make doubly sure. And yes, there were times when he was frustrated, learning major steps, a particularly difficult piece, but he stayed through it and we actually never really had to say no to quitting, he never really asked, because he knew he had to try. </p>
<p>That is not what Chua is doing from what I can tell, she tells/ told the kids what they are going to do, and then sits on them every step of the way to make sure they do everything, forces them to grind through things, and it seems like there is little or no experience for them of being in things where it is really tough to succeed, where they may never be the best, or where a clearly defined path is not involved. Put it this way, the violin and piano can be learned at a very high level simply by grinding your way through it, you can achieve high technical mastery, play difficult pieces and by copying what a teacher tells you to do, achieve a certain level of ‘musicality’ (on the other hand, that person would never make it as a musician, no one would ever want to see them play). The Delay book Brooklyn mentioned is full of examples of kids like this, who were trained that way, and there was nothing there, and I see it almost every week when I go to recitals and such. And I have seen the parents of these kids (these are teenagers), they sit in the lessons, record the lessons, argue with the teacher about repertoire, force the kids into competitions, sit with them when they practice, harang them…and it shows in the kids playing, they are not playing as musicians. </p>
<p>Likewise, if you are learning stuff to do well in school, to get great grades on tests, it doesn’t require someone really learning the subject, it can be done by learning the material by rote learning, heavy duty studying and such, memorization, doesn’t mean the kid actually understands the material (example, with history classes, often these were memorizing facts and if there are essays, you can get a good grade spouting back what the teacher spun out in class and/or reading. ). </p>
<p>The problem being, when you guide kids into things where they can achieve by gutting through, when you put them in things where in effect they don’t have to truly struggle, where gutting through can get over any obstacle, they don’t learn how to deal with adversity well in my opinion.</p>
<p>I’ll use your own example, where your D, a mathematician type, was asked by a Quant to help with a model he was working on (something I am familiar with a bit). Your D had no experience with trading, with things like risk based pricing of instruments, the time series data that is used in pricing derivatives and so forth. in your D’s case, she was able to talk to people about how this worked, do research, and learn about the thing on her own, piecing it together, and more importantly, interpolating the various pieces of information into a picture of how to do it, and that isn’t easy. It requires confidence, and more importantly, the ability to take a nebulous situation and be able to pull something together even though the ‘true’ answer isn’t known, and the path itself is kind of fuzzy. Somewhere along the lines your D had to work things out herself, had to find her own path, and that is really important, and that tells me that as much as you directed your D’s life, you also gave her the latitude to work things out. Actually, the fact that she was able to work out something like that is impressive because those kind of calculations are not mechanical formulas (unlike say Yield to maturity on a fixed income instrument), they have a lot of fuzzy areas in them, including on how to work out the time series relationships of how price moves over time with a given product and interpolating that with a model predicting future pricing. You did did that all on her own, something someone who has been told how to do everything won’t be able to do. </p>
<p>There is direction at various levels, but there also is the need for people to figure things out for themselves. I have seen real world examples of the Chua approach and how it doesn’t work. When faced with something like I deal with routinely, where all the information is not known, where information is not nicely laid out like they do in school, where there isn’t necessarily a ‘right’ answer, these kids often can’t do it, if everything isn’t nicely laid out for them, with a clear goal and such, they panic. In software development, these kind of kids seem to need everything spec’ed out to the last iota, and they write their code based on that, they don’t do ‘what if’s’ because they have been trained “do what you are told”. Meanwhile, it often isn’t that well designed and they don’t function well. </p>
<p>There is a good example of this in music. The kind of kids raised like Chua seems to do achieve a certain technical mastery, there is no doubt about that, it is often very high level. But want an example of where this fails, big time and highlights what I am talking about? Give a kid like this a piece of music they have never seen, and ask them to sight read it. More often then not, they will sit there staring at the music, and I have seen cases where teachers in master classes did it and the student, supposedly a high level music student, sat there then burst our crying, basically saying “how can I play it if I don’t know how, never have seen the music”. Meanwhile, take a music student who among other things has learned about the music itself, has learned music theory, has learned about the differences in musical styles in the different eras, who has had to work out music a lot by themselves…that person can look at the piece of music, analyze the style, the chord structure and so forth, and can come up with a reasonable, if technically flawed, playing of the piece that nonetheless, if it is a beethoven concerto sounds like Beethoven or if Copeland sounded like Copeland. </p>
<p>And of course there are different parenting styles, but usually it comes down to a kind of scale where the level of control, of direction, varies. Someone can be a directive parent, demand that the kid try, give the kid strong direction, which sounds like your style, Oldfort, but from what you have written you also weren’t the puppet-master parent with everything, telling them what to do,how to do it, you simply demanded that whatever they did, they do the best they can, really try, and there is nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, someone like Chua, who basically tells them what they may or may not do with everything, who rather then demand excellence sit on the kid like a drillmaster to achieve that, is well beyond directive parenting, that is absolute control, big difference in level. </p>
<p>And like I said, this mania for being #1 in everything is kind of ridiculous, because no one can be, and I guarantee you, her daughters are going to run into that might fast. In the narrow little world that she created for them they may be able to be #1 (or at least what she thinks is #1; but when they hit the real world they are going to find people that in almost anything they do are better then them (not the same person, I mean in general) and also are going to find out that the methods their mom used often don’t work well in ‘real life’, that there are going to be things that no matter how hard they hit it, they aren’t going to be the best at, and how to deal with that, everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and when you grow up where all you do is play to things where you can be strong, you don’t learn to deal with that (again, OF, I am not saying this is true of yourself, I am talking Chua and her type of control freak). More importantly, there are plenty of things where it is okay not to be #1; heck the whole point of Karaoke is to do something in front of others and make a fool of yourself, if someone went out, got singing lessons so they could sing better then everyone else, they would end up with a glass of sake poured over their head, because that would be considered bad sport:). </p>
<p>On the competition model, again in music there is a negative side to that, when you view everything as a competition. There have been a ton of articles about music education in China (Strad magazine had a huge spread on it), and about the fact that it is turning out high level musical students but many of them cannot make it as musicians, that they are lacking things needed to be a musician. The method of instruction is much like Chua’s, where the teachers teach the technical mastery of really difficult pieces, the kids practice many hours a day, they go to state schools that from an early age train them only on music and so forth…one of the problems is these kids are learning to play notes., not music, and they are not known for musical expressiveness and interpretation, and many of them know almost nothing about music theory or basic things like the difference between playing Beethoven or Haydn. </p>
<p>More importantly, the attitude of the students and even the teachers is much like Chua, that they need to be “#1”, and everything is about technical mastery and whiz bang playing. Problem is, until recently, the teaching has ignored or relegated to a back burner music theory,history of music and so forth, and also has viewed things like chamber music and orchestra as being “for losers” (btw, I see the same thing here with the Chua like parents and their kids in music, same attitude). Because chamber and orchestra are groups, and there isn’t any “#1”, the disdain it as for 'losers who can’t win competitions and become soloists". </p>
<p>Among other things, besides the obvious fact that ensemble playing is what most musicians do, that focus on "winning’ leaves you with musicians who aren’t even very good as solo performers and have a horrible time in orchestra or chamber, because they simply can’t understand doing something where they can’t be “#1”. The point being that in things like dance or music, the number 1 is the artistry, the instrument, the dance techniques, are tools to express what the choreographer has designed or the composer has written, it is the music or dance that is #1. Yes, these are competitive fields, but the key to this is in expressing the art as beautifully as possible and the position follows from that; when you concentrate on #1 being the goal, rather then expressing the art to the best of your ability and hope it is good enough to be #1, the person is totally missing the point, it is like the athlete who focuses on himself, when most sports are team based, they end up being the headcases no one wants to be around. </p>
<p>Again, I think what people are criticizing with Chua is the extremes she took it to, that in effect she created this rigid script for success, that avoids choice, that avoids things where her kids could have run into having a hard time, not being #1, controlled everything, and that that particular type of directed parenting can have negative consequences, and most people have cited examples of why they think that. And again, I think with Amy Chua, she decided to write this book, she put it out there and some of it quite frankly was her saying “this is the way to parent”, the way the book seems to be written (I skimmed it at the library the other night), it doesn’t read like a memoir of ‘how I was humbled’, it is more like “I managed great, but my kids didn’t go along with the script” or something like that, and the way it is being promoted it is being promoted as ‘superior’ parenting, which many people think is ridiculous.</p>
<p>If you really want to learn everything about Wagner, all you need to do is look on You Tube and look up the Bugs Bunny “What’s Opera Doc?”, you have everything you need to know (actually, thanks to that 6 minutes of perfect parody by Carl Stallings and Chuck Jones, I have had some problems sitting through the real deal, all I want to do is burst out singing “I’m going to kill the Wabbit, kill the wabbit, kill the waaaa-bit”). </p>
<p>Thinking of that, I can’t tell you the number of musicians I have heard say that the music of the old bugs bunny/looney toons cartoons inspired them to get into music…just think of all the inspiration people like Chua who think cartoons are a waste of time are denying their kids <em>lol</em></p>
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<p>I think oldfort mentioned a few pages back that she had moved beyond the Chua discussion. Hence, the confusion.</p>
<p>I can empathize as I often find myself debating a completely different issue than everyone else on a thread.</p>
<p>Bovertine-</p>
<p>Oldfort was still talking about Chua, or at least her parenting style, and what was confusing to me was that Oldfort seemed to be saying that others on here were putting off their parenting styles as the best (they weren’t), and more puzzling was Oldfort thinking we were criticizing directed parenting, where parents are involved, and no one was, we were criticizing the methods Chua used, not directed parenting. Among other things, Oldfort assumed that the parents criticizing Chua, if there kids were struggling at something, would let them simply quit, and none of us said that, what we said was simply a)the kid has a right to choose things they wish to do and b)if they don’t find something atttractive, if they dont’ have an interest or passion, it is okay to try something else, there is a big difference. If someone tries the violin and doesn’t have a passion for it, why keep playing it when perhaps something else would be a passion? There is a big difference between that, dropping it because the kid isn’t interested, and dropping it because it is hard, two different things.</p>
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<p>oldfort specifically wrote that she was moving beyond a discussion of the Chua book several pages back. She then moved into a spirited defense of various forms of parenting. </p>
<p>She can surely speak for herself, as evidenced by many lengthy posts, but I think if you are looking to debate the specifics of the Chua method you will find that she is going to stray from that specific topic, making for a somewhat disjointed colloquy.</p>
<p>From post 1462 on, people have been just posting about various ways of parenting (mostly their own). There was one post in particular when someone started with “parents must…parents need to…” and a lot of reference to stage moms. I think people even started to get into benefit of unschooled children. I was just trying to offer a different way of parenting. Nothing to do with Chua. I think Pizzagirl is the only one who has stuck with the Chua discussion.:)</p>
<p>bovertine - you are absolutely write right that I could speak for myself, but you were right on the money.</p>
<p>I was beyond Chua discussion. I wouldn’t have jumped back in if people didn’t go off on different parenting styles. I don’t believe in “live and let live” when it comes to kids. I think parents can and do play a big role on what kids become, more nurture rather than nature. I am a believer that whenever parents say, “I think it’s best to let kids do what they want,” it is a cop out. It is less trouble for parents to do nothing than to take a stand.</p>
<p>Let me just add that I think parents could have influence on their kids up to 10-12, after that they have become who they are. In my kids’ case, I stopped telling them what to do a lot after that.</p>
<p>Not up to reading this entire thread, but I just saw the author on a televised interview and had to comment. She spent the entire interview retreating from what she wrote in the book. She also appeared to me as a bit scattered and disoriented. But then it may have been the 20th interview she did that day.</p>
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<p>I agree, but I don’t think anyone here meant that it is best to let kids do want they want if it means eating 3 large bags of Lay’s potato chips while watching reruns of “The Girls Next Door” every night. They were talking in terms of valuing a myriad of extracurriculars, not just piano and violin, and allowing the child to explore what interests them within that realm.</p>
<p>It is just as much of a cop out, and much easier for a parent, to choose the child’s interests for them, and determine exactly what a child will be doing every minute of the day, than to allow the child to explore interests that might be foreign to and cause anxiety for the parent because those parents can’t think outside of what they value for themselves.</p>
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<p>No, I do not agree with that. Right or wrong, it is much tougher for a parent to choose the child’s interest because if a child doesn’t want to do it, then the child will fight a parent on it. That is why every child specialist tells us “pick your battle.” Unfortunately, too many parents out there choose not to pick any battle with their kids.</p>
<p>Yong Zhao responds to Tiger mom</p>
<p>[Yong</a> Zhao Blog Archive You must be joking, Professor Chua: An open letter to the Chinese Tiger Mom](<a href=“http://zhaolearning.com/2011/01/15/you-must-be-joking-professor-chua-an-open-letter-to-the-chinese-tiger-mom/]Yong”>Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » You must be joking, Professor Chua: An open letter to the Chinese Tiger Mom)</p>
<p>Yong Zhao is currently Presidential Chair and Associate Dean for Global Education, College of Education at the University of Oregon, where he also serves as the director of the Center for Advanced Technology in Education (CATE). He is a fellow of the International Academy for Education.</p>
<p>Until December, 2010, Yong Zhao was University Distinguished Professor at the College of Education, Michigan State University, where he also served as the founding director of the Center for Teaching and Technology, executive director of the Confucius Institute, as well as the US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence.</p>
<p>I’m not seeing much use of the phrases to which oldfort is objecting. I used the “Search this Thread” feature, and came up with just a few posts that had “parents need to” or “parents must.” They look mostly unobjectionable to me. (And a few of them preceded post #1462.)</p>
<p>Somewhat after 1462, calmom posted: “I think that parents need to also help their kids recognize the value of being part of a group effort, of taking pride in their own efforts whether recognized or not, of being able to sincerely and genuinely appreciate and encourage the accomplishments of team-mates or fellow members of their group endeavor, and of also understanding that the “starring” role is not always the best or most appropriate for their own individual talents.”</p>
<p>and also “Parents also need to help their kids aim for realistic goals, including being realistic about their own kid’s ability and performance.” </p>
<p>calmom did not suggest prescriptive means for doing this. Do you see something wrong with these goals in themselves, oldfort? Or did I overlook some post?</p>