<p>“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>Again, oldfort, your thinking in some ways is like Chua’s, it is this black and white,that if you in effect don’t control every aspect of their life, you are slacking, and that is ridiculous. You are basically doing what you claim others are doing for your style of parenting, you are denigrating other styles by saying that.</p>
<p>If parents allow their kids to explore and find their passion, it is not easy, it isn’t a cop out, it is recognizing that children, within bounds, have the right to their own aspirations and dreams. And frankly that is a lot harder then totally directed parenting, if for different reasons. When a child chooses a path, especially one the parent knows little about, it is scary, because as a parent you are navigating uncharted waters that are rough. In music, despite what chua and others believe, for someone serious about music the path isn’t clear (don’t believe me? Read the music major board on here). As you point out, if you have the kid on the academic track, push them to achieve high grades, do the 'right" ec’s, take the APs, do great on the SAT, you can be pretty much assured of getting into a great school, do well there, and chances are you can get into med school then become a doctor…it is easy because becoming a doctor (or a number of other professional fields) are a lot easier, because you can script the path (which is why Chua and her kind probably choose it, little ambiguity). And when you become a doctor, you can always get a job…</p>
<p>With something like music and the arts, the path is nebulous, it is very complex, has large elements of luck and so forth. One of the reasons that many Asian students run into trouble with music is because they and their teachers think there is such a path, that if you play the instrument at a virtuostic level, which can be achieved by long practice and being pushed, you can get into a high level music school/conservatory, and then, coming out of there, you will get a job as a high level soloist or member of a top orchestra or whatever…and it fails a lot of the time, because much of music is an unknown quantity. And navigating it is like going down an uncharted river in a canoe, whereas if you want the kid to be a doctor there is a well charted path with a gps to back you up…</p>
<p>I am not saying being a doctor or whatever is not a good thing, i am saying that choosing that as the path for your child (or rather, similar postions) is not going to be harder then paths like the arts…which in turn generally comes from kids finding their own passion (kids pushed into the arts 99% of the time end up not doing so well, you can’t force that).</p>
<p>But getting back to your original point, allowing kids to make choices is not the same as doing nothing, it is not sitting back and saying whatever, that is patently false. You yourself point out that parents have to choose the battles, and that is true. If our son sloughs off his academic work, which is easy to do because he is homeschooling, we are all over him with it, he has to do the work there. Likewise, if he has other things we feel he needs to do, like get an application in for something, and so forth, we are on him. When he was still going to school, and finding the demands of music and school, we made sure that the academics were getting done and held up, and that he still did what he needed to do for music, and at times it was a battle. Over the years, we have faced temper tantrums, complaining, anger, rage, you name it, when there were things we felt he needed to do and he was resisting and no, it isn’t easy.</p>
<p>But there is a reason why you pick your battles, because choosing your child’s path like that totally snows under the kids self, it is basically saying you are a stupid kid, I know everything, so shut up and do what a I say, and that is IMO as bad as saying do what you want. Sure, there are things I know my son doesn’t know, things I have learned, and he I hope benefits from them (when he isn’t rolling his eyes), and there are times when I make an ‘executive decision’, like if he is thinking of doing something that I think would not work for him, like another music activity when he has so many. I probably could guide him into a professional program, or a tech job, pretty easily, i could lay out that course, but just because I think that is a great thing to do into doesn’t mean I have more wisdom then my son. My reasons may be very legitimate, that you can do well financially in those positions, but is that really the best path for my child?</p>
<p>And again, choosing everything for your child is a lot easier. Yeah, kids will resist, not like it, but guess what? As a parent, you have the ultimate power, especially when younger, kids are hardwired in the early years to obey their parents, and considering that the parent controls the kids lives at that point, not much of a fight, it is very one sided if you really want to battle them on everything, force them into your way of thinking. Sorry, I don’t buy the confucian idea that parents are gods and fonts of wisdom so I better tell them what to do with everything, children do need guidance and boundaries, but forcing them on a path the parent controls in not difficult, it is a power game, in effect doing someting because the parent can IMO. Even with the best of intentions, that the parent feels this is the best path, it may very well not be, it is assuming that the parents idea of success and happiness is going to be the kids, and that is not true. Memoirs are full of people who broke away from parents like that, and shrinks offices are full of people who had to deal with that kind of control. Like I said, see the movie “Shine” to see the consequences of a parent doing that, or what can be a consequence. </p>
<p>BTW, your comment about athletes and so forth not needing support is dead wrong, few athletes or anything else succeed because of ‘natural ability’ or ‘self made’…read Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” to see what it takes, and it takes a lot. Natural born is overblown, and he pretty much puts that to rest (there are natural abilities and tendencies, but that is only part of the picture). It takes hard work, Gladwell says it is the 10,000 hour rule, that to get good at anything takes that kind of time and hard work; and he also points out that some of it is luck of the draw, that when a kid was born changed things (for example, if Bill Gates had been born 5 years later then he was, he wouldn’t have played the role he did, or with young hockey players in canada your birth month means a lot towards becoming good), and the biggie, support. In music and dancing and such, without parental support, given the level of excellence required these days, isn’t going to happen.Not many years go on the violin, for example, someone could play the violin, study with a local teacher at a school level, and then ‘get serious’ in college; that isn’t going to happen today, basically if you aren’t seriously going at it by the time you hit high school, achieved a certain level of mastery by then, you aren’t going to make it at any kind of level, with some rare exceptions. And that mastery needs a lot of support, it is expensive (talk to sports parents just how much pursuing sports at a high level costs and about things like travel teams and practices and so forth, or music,and so forth). The plus side of the directive parenting is a parent is forced to support the child,if you are going to pick everything you have to support it. One of the big problems with some forms of parenting is telling a kid “if you want to do x, go ahead” and then not being involved, that is a recipe for failure, it requires support, too. The most gifted athlete or musician or academically gifted kid left to their own fate like that is not going to succeed 99 times out of 100. </p>
<p>Just as a general footnote, I can bet your father wasn’t alone in his ‘success’, oldfort (and that is not a knock on him, or saying it was easy, it isn’t, my wife wasn’t born here, i see families who have uprooted everything to have their kids study music here, my own family not far back were immigrants,it takes guts and hard work to immigrate), when people achieve success that old “rugged individualist” theory, the Ayn Rand nonsense, is pretty much that. When people succeed, at whatever, of course they need to work hard and strive, there is no doubt about it, but when you look at the path of immigrants or anyone else, there are plenty of people who helped them. Koreans in the 1980’s like many immigrants before them often owned small businesses, and when they came here (I am talking NYC, 1980’s for this example) there were other Koreans who helped them, there was a kind of community pool of funds to help establish a business, others to help them figure out how to do things, and so forth (and similar things have existed within other groups). There also were city agencies to help small business, volunteer groups to help immigrants settle, and so forth. My wife and her family came here with nothing from eastern europe, and they were helped by groups like Catholic Charities and through contacts groups had, were able to find a place to live and navigate in a new country.
Ironically, the kind of people who control everything in their kids life, who set the path to achieve a certain life path, are often people who won’t immigrate, but when you immigrate you never know what is going to happen (unless you happen to be independantly wealthy already) and the whole point of the ‘fixed path’ is to take as much ambiguity out of things as possible IMO. </p>
<p>When people become successful in business, there is a whole circle of mentors and people who helped them, as David McCullough the historian said "show me the ‘self made man’ and I’ll show you are least 10 people that helped them’. Not only do people have to learn to work in groups to succeed because most jobs require that, they also need to learn to deal with people because they are going to need help, the person who claims they did it 'all on their own’is being egostical, to say the least. </p>
<p>I think the key summary point with parenting is a)there aren’t any ‘superior’ methods over others because the goals a method might be shooting for may not be the goals of another b)superiority is in final outcomes of how a kid lives his life and c) even within a given style, there is no rigid formula. The level of control a parent exerts depends on themselves and also their child,and circumstances, and it isn’t black and white, either you totally control the child or you do nothing (and yes, for the record, I believe far too many parents are afraid to parent, they want to be their kids friend first and foremost instead of being a parent first and then friend), and it isn’t, it is many shades of gray. The real distinction is between those who are parents and refuse to be a parent i.e basically ignore the child and refuse to guide or set boundaries, and parenting at all other levels, and the first is not what I or others were talking about. </p>
<p>.We tried to give our son as much freedom as possible, which obviously changed as he matured, and encouraged him to try a variety of things to see what he liked and didn’t like, we helped guide him, but ultimately as with music and the instrument he played, he chose the path, we supported it as best we could, as we did with everything.No, we didn’t let him do anything he wanted, he had bounds, and he knew why he had those bounds as best we could tell him, but he also knew we tried to respect his wishes and desires, to, within reason. He wasn’t a kid we all hate, who you see in a store whining they want this and that, he isn’t a rude child by any means, he is very respectful of others, empathetic, and is also not greedy or materialistic and works as hard as any kid whose parents force them to do things, yet does it for his own sake. No, he isn’t perfect, I won’t hold him up as that, he can be a pain at times, a pain in the tchukus (approximation of a yiddish word for butt), and I would never claim this is the best path, just saying he has had freedom to make a lot of choices but also was guided and when needed disciplined by us and had boundaries. We could very well do the same thing with another kid, and have the fail miserably <em>shrug</em>.</p>