<p>While understandable, it certainly wasn’t wise if Sophia and/or her mother wanted to minimize her portion of an already unfolding public firestorm. By writing that article, Sophia placed herself further in the public eye to be scrutinized and also further linked herself to her mother’s self-aggrandizing media promotions of her controversial and to some…inflammatory book. </p>
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<p>Writing a controversial book on a sensitive topic such as “best” parenting techniques is already enough to elicit angry responses and perceptions of inflammatory content by itself. </p>
<p>When one adds the author’s self-aggrandizing self-promotion in the media which could easily be considered inflammatory by those who disagree with her on such a topic, it is the equivalent of someone deliberately smashing a hive of vicious hornets or wasps and wondering why they are getting stung by the ensuing swarm. Likewise, the widespread reaction of the greater public is IMHO, an inevitable outcome of how Chua went about writing and promoting her book in the mass media.</p>
<p>Igloo, I agree that we can’t keep Chua’s kids and how they’ve turned out out of a discussion of her parenting methods. The problem for those flinging the brickbats is that, as far as we can tell, they’ve turned out great!</p>
<p>As for your point about the effect of these kids upon other kids middle school placement:</p>
<p>"I think that a student who is subjected to the “regular” level of American academics really is being short-changed. Perhaps over time, the schools will adjust and re-normalize the expectations for the advanced academic track. But it takes time for them to respond, and to offer normal-bright students the same academic challenges they would have had 10 years ago. "</p>
<p>I don’t disagree with what you said here (note to self: must master the quoting function on this forum) but the answer can’t be for the other kids to perform at a lower level than they are capable of. That’s like telling the kids who train from toddlerhood to be spectacular basketball players to dial it back because our kids arent’ making the high school varsity teams. It won’t ever happen, nor should it IMO.</p>
<p>Here’s the quote I should have used from the Atlantic article:</p>
<p>Chua has accepted, in a way that the good mothers will not, that most children today cant have it both ways: they cant have a fun, low-stress childhood and also an Ivy League education. She understood early onas the good mothers are about to learn, when the heartbreaking e-mails and letters from the top colleges go out this monththat life is a series of choices, each with its own rewards and consequences. In a sense, that is the most unpalatable message of her book, the one that has caused all the anguish: its an unwelcome reminder (how can we keep forgetting this?) that the world really doesnt lie before us like a land of dreams. At bestat the very bestit can only offer us choices between two good things, and as we grasp at one, we lose the other forever.</p>
<p>I disagree on this one. I think it’s’ a matter of degree of misnaming and how it comes about. I certainly think Carnegie Debut is something else. You just don’t misname like that. I have to say I don’t know if Amy Chua really said it that way. If she did and made a connection between that and long practice sessions, I don’t see how it should be left undisputed.</p>
<p>Have you noticed, TheGFG, where the “mini Einsteins in 4th grade” are in 11th or 12th grade? Some kids grow sooner, but by age 14-17, the real size appears. Exceptional is rare, for any group of people.</p>
<p>I think that the point is that the schools need to adjust their placement strategies and offerings, so that the advanced track is open to more than the top n%, particularly if the achievement cut-off to be in the top n% in a given district keeps rising.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t advocate holding anyone back, to keep the cut-off lower. On the other hand, I do think that a significant fraction of children who were subjected to a Tiger-Mom style of upbringing would become neurotic (and in adulthood, somewhat bossy). This does have an effect on their community. The fact that Sophia and Lulu seem to have escaped this is commendable on their part, but I think the outcome lacks generality.</p>
<p>If true, some sub-cultures would regard the above as misleadingly pretentious exaggeration at best and nearly/equivalent to lying at worst. </p>
<p>From a cousin and several friends who attended US Service Academies, the above would definitely fall under “quibbling” which is usually regarded by academy authorities as a form of lying and sanctionable if committed by cadets. Sanctions for this act includes anything up to and including dismissal from the academy.</p>
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<p>From having been around many students with hothouse parents similar to Chua, only a few become bossy. Most are just unhappy with depressive and/or neurotic tendencies that are often concealed under an effective veneer of above-average self-control…especially in the high school/college/grad school years. The visible effects of this usually come out years after graduation from college or grad school in the form of existential crises that I’ve started to see among my now 30-something HS classmates who have excelled in elite undergrad/grad/professional schools and now wondered whether it all mattered now that the career they spent much time and effort preparing for turned out to be ill-suited to them and was really their parents’ dream…not their own. </p>
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<p>I hope you’re right but IME…it is too early to tell at this point. If they’re still fine in their 30s…then they’ve done far better than most children of hothouse parents I’ve encountered or read about.</p>
<p>^^^^
Well, it’s truly too early to tell about any of our kids, isn’t it? Sadly, any one of us could have children who develop mental illness/emotional problems in the coming years. Is it always the result of our parenting decisions? AFAICT, an awful lot of children of parents who have always been sensitive and never harsh with them still become troubled and unhappy with their lives.</p>
<p>I don’t know that we can predict that it will happen more often with the children of the Tiger Moms, no matter how much we’d like that to be true.</p>
<p>Since most primary and secondary schools grade on an absolute scale rather than a curve, they could simply replace some lower level courses with higher level courses if the students are better than those in previous years.</p>
<p>While not every child’s mental illness/emotional problems in the coming years is due to parenting decisions, being subjected to hothouse parents who micromanage their children to the point of controlling their ECs, choice of major, course selections, and career path is at best, not very helpful in that regard. </p>
<p>Moreover, the sensitive parents’ kids you referred to who become troubled and unhappy in their lives tend to exhibit their troubles and unhappiness in markedly different ways IME.</p>
<p>Of course you are right, ucbalumnus–but the schools in TheGFG’s district apparently didn’t adapt to rising accomplishment at the top, right away. I think it’s unlikely that ours would do so, either. They were actually rather hostile toward acceleration in mathematics–although perhaps that reflected concerns about encouraging a math “arms race.” I have run into TheGFG on other threads & believe that TheGFG’s children span a range of years, so post #1786 probably gives a longitudinal view of the district.</p>
<p>Yes, I believe so. I am sure there are others better qualified to comment on this. My take is that techniques are constantly developed to push physical limts. If you can reach an octave, there will be a piece that forces you to reach 2 octaves.</p>
<p>Nonsense. I simply don’t buy this in general. (I would substitute “excellent elite education” for “Ivy League”, but the point remains the same.)</p>
<p>This quote from the Atlantic article greatly simplifies the reaction to the perceived Tiger Mom approach, as though those of us who are reacting strongly are the kind of people who ‘want to have our cake and eat it, too’.</p>
<p>It is one thing to have high expectations for your child and try to do your best to have your child meet those expectations. It does take commitment and sacrifice, from a young age, to excel in both academic and non-academic pursuits. At times, there will be stress, but more as they get older. I have no problem with the high expectations and providing opportunities.</p>
<p>But then there’s the “no sleepovers”, “no bathroom until you finish the practicing”, “I’m gonna burn your stuffed animals”, “you’re a barbarian, etc. (when the kid simply didn’t want to try caviar!)”. </p>
<p>Is this really necessary to raise an overachiever? </p>
<p>Also, I can’t understand why a elementary school kid or middle school kid, for example, needs to feel ‘stressed’. And, as the book shows, when a kid that young is going to feel so much stress, there are going to be repercussions. LuLu smashing glasses in a restaurant!!?? Totally unacceptable in my book, and a consequence of the environment Tiger Mom has created for her. In some ways, this incident is a particularly ‘mild’ reaction to the stress created by Chua, and she was lucky that her daughter acted out so early. To her credit, Chua realized that she needed to pull back. But imagine if Lulu didn’t act out, and held it all in, and the situation persisted. </p>
<p>My oldest is an overachiever, in his first year at a top school, and started in his particular EC–a sport–at quite a young age. It required a lot of our time to get him to practices, etc., and be on the road for tournaments on weekends. It wasn’t until high school, when the sport expectations and the school expectations were so much greater, that he felt the pressure. He had bad games, but coach simply pulled him from the field and that was message enough–no screaming or telling him how horrible he played. </p>
<p>I did realize that if he wanted to truly excel in his sport, he was going to have to practice on his own, outside of organized practices. But it wasn’t for hours and hours, and he liked to do this, especially if friends came along (but most of the time it was by himself).</p>
<p>He graduated as the val, test scores in the 99%, all-state in his sport, selected as one of the top players in his region, etc. </p>
<p>I agree with skrlvr: it’s very simplistic to paint those of us who disagree with Chua as parents too lazy or with kids too lazy to follow such a labor and time-intensive method. I can’t speak for others, but my kids never spent hours languishing in front of the TV or playing video games. Like skrlvr’s child, they worked hard on their studies and hard on their EC’s. But they also had time to read books that weren’t assigned, keep up with world news, and do a number of valuable things which did not lead to a better GPA, SAT score, or some national recognition. There’s no award or college-worthy accomplishment to be gained from mowing your grandmother’s lawn for her, helping your little sister with her math homework, or playing the villager in the school play in which your friend is the princess. </p>
<p>Perhaps one reason cobrat’s friends are having existential crises is that they are learning that so much of life is about laboring in obscurity, unnoticed and unappreciated. If they have lived a childhood of always being the princess in the play and never the fifth villager, they have not learned that our sense of the value of what we do can’t always come from external measures. I don’t know about you all, but as a mother there is a great deal of what I do each day that fits more into the category of fifth villager than princess.</p>
<p>With regard to my district, I am all for children working up to their full academic potential. The problem is that in the past, if a student was intelligent, did his K-3rd grade schoolwork with excellence, and scored 95%-100% on his regularly scheduled grade level math tests, he’d have been placed into the advanced math track sometime between 4th and 6th grade. Now, however, he must score above 90% on a test containing the material normally taught two grade levels up in order to be placed into the advanced group. Thus, just being smart and having an aptitude for math is not sufficient, except in rare cases. The child must be pre-taught, which around here happens in places like Kumon, Saturday schools, etc. As we speak, parents in my town are frantically preparing their kids for the upcoming middle school math placement test. Note the word “preparing.” Test prep meets middle school. Yikes. So now, instead of mowing grandmother’s lawn on Sat. morning, a child needs to work math problems if he wants to have a shot at advanced math in middle school. If he doesn’t, he can’t get into advanced math in high school. The tracking starts now. That’s my beef.</p>
<p>It may be hard for Chua-type parents to process, but some of us have bright children who are so focused on extra-curricular interests (from music to sports to programming computers to watching birds, to reading for pleasure to electronics) that we as parents do not have to forbid all kinds of pleasures such as learning tennis or going on sleepovers in order to get these children to spend hours on end absorbed in these pursuits. That is in some respect, the interests “choose” our children and we follow along, offering guidance perhaps only so that they do not lead to a dead end in adulthood for want of work on other skills.</p>
<p>Instead, our big problem is convincing our children that sometimes they need to take a break from hours devoted to their hobbies. If we are lucky, they look at learning in school as a way to acquire tools (such as higher math, skill in writing) to feed their interests even further, or they figure out that doing well might give them a “hook” to get into a good college not for the prestige so much as for access to world renowned profs, courses not taught or supported at most colleges (many requiring professor permission or audition to enroll), and fancy labs to “play” in. </p>
<p>Many colleges LOVE these self-directed kids, BTW, if they can also do acceptable levels of school work (and even if they are lopsided in programs that make enough allowances for lopsided kids.)</p>
<p>GFG - I see your frustration wrt the advanced math track. Luckily, in our district, there is some movement among math tracks even into high school. The advanced track does snag a few students a year who love math and do not need the outside prepping, or much outside prepping, to score well on standardized tests. Among those who prep, some will do very, very well, some will find it very time-consuming to keep up and will drop down a track, and others will hit a wall, burn out, or end up hating math and never taking another math class in their lives once they hit college.</p>
<p>Interestingly, there are also students at our high school who do not begin to do well in math until they get to calculus and beyond. Summer courses should allow such students to catch up with many peers who started down the intensive math road years earlier, except perhaps at the very tippy top levels that even most students on the fast track via tutoring will never reach anyway.</p>
<p>Eh, I’m not convinced the world comes to a blithering end either if on occasion, a kid does sit, veg, and watch a lot of TV. Everything in moderation. Everyone needs to decompress. Our generation certainly has fond memories of our Brady Bunch (etc) marathons, no?</p>
<p>Actually, recreational reading and helping others with their math homework likely helps improve one’s reading skills, knowledge in the subjects read, and math skills, indirectly improving school and standardized test performance. And being in the school play can’t hurt with respect to performing arts.</p>
<p>Doing intellectually stimulating things recreationally certainly seems like a much better route to higher achievement than having a tiger mother dictator of a parent.</p>
<p>Re: your district’s math placement policy</p>
<p>Why did they not continue to follow the old policy? Seems like they are encouraging an “arms race” of prep/cram schools, rather than just letting students find the math courses appropriate for their ability as it was under the old system.</p>