It starts early on – the competitive spirit in parents that perhaps we don’t want to readily admit we possess.
“Oh, my child has been sleeping through the night since he was six weeks old,” a mum in a mother’s group might say. And then it progresses – “Walking? Oh, she was doing handstands at 12 months!” And then before you know it your babies have grown into little kids who are trotting off to school – and that’s when the competitiveness takes an academic edge.
“Forget addition and subtraction,” a Kindergartner’s mum might boast. “He’s doing long division.”
“Tiger Mom” Amy Chua has built her career off the knowledge that parents can be highly competitive. She knows that some parents are determined to do anything to ensure that their kids outdo their peers. It’s why her first book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” sold by the truckload. In it she prescribes her style of strict Chinese parenting in order to push your children to do their best – for example, Chua forbade her seven year-old daughter from eating, drinking or going to the toilet until she mastered a difficult piece of music on the piano. She also doesn’t allow her children to go on playdates or sleepovers, watch TV or to “not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama”.
Now Chua’s back with another book that further reinforces that certain ethnic and religious groups produce more successful kids. In this book she argues that “Jewish, Indian, Chinese, Iranian, Lebanese-Americans, Nigerians, Cuban exiles and Mormons” make better parents – if by better you mean parents who are highly focussed on academic and career success. It doesn’t necessarily mean happy parents or happy kids.
Here in Australia, some media commentators have gone on to question why current lists of “highest-achieving students is dominated by surnames like Chen, Lee, Tan, Foo, Ng and Kwong, with only the occasional Anglo name like Toohey and Gunn”.
Aside from the fact that this sort of questioning doesn’t really count people with “ethnic” surnames as “true Australians”, it goes on to reinforce stereotypes that exist about people from certain cultural groups - “Asian” parents are hard-working and send their kids to academic coaching, while “Australian” parents are slack and let their kids “veg out in front of the plasma TV or computer screen.”
Such articles, along with Chua’s books, seem to reinforce an angst that resides in Western nations about our lack of progress in comparison to Asian countries. We see places like China and India doing so well economically and we wonder whether adopting certain cultural practices may make us perform better.
What Chua and others don’t mention is that the quest for academic success in places like China is so intense that suicides amongst students is commonplace – mostly because these kids didn’t feel they’ve lived up to expectations. In fact, some Chinese students are now being asked to sign suicide waivers to absolve the school of any blame if they commit suicide.
Chua doesn’t go into how dangerous it can be to promote these types of stereotypes, or contemplate how it might alienate cultural groups from one another and creates an increased sense of isolation for kids who are born into one culture but grow up in another.
Academic success, or lack thereof, doesn’t mean we will necessarily do well or bad in life. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Oprah all dropped out of university and yet went on to become highly successful people.
The question also comes down to how we define success. Is success defined purely through what grades we get at school and university, and what kind of job we do? Or is success defined through a sense of well-being and fulfilment?
I think the latter. Many people would equate happiness in life with success. Yet people like Chua would like us to believe that those who spend 60-80 hours a week at work and hardly get to see their families yet have an important title to their name are more successful than those who are working towards not only their own emotional and physical well-being but their children’s.
Yes, we all have different work ethics, ambitions and goals. Much of what we do is determined by the background from which we come.
But does that mean you can define entire races and religions as being driven by the same desire? No. Most of us form parenting decisions based on what we believe is the best thing for us and for our children. If these decisions create divisions and are at the cost of our kids’ wellbeing, then are they really the best course of action?
I think not. For me, real success doesn’t come from trying to live up to impossible standards, but from a sense of satisfaction with oneself and doing something that you love – no matter what it may be.
I hope to pass this measure of success to my children, too.
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