{"id":178,"date":"2011-01-12T03:18:32","date_gmt":"2011-01-12T07:18:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/community\/philosophicalfragments\/?p=178"},"modified":"2011-01-12T03:18:32","modified_gmt":"2011-01-12T07:18:32","slug":"why-chinese-mothers-are-average-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/philosophicalfragments\/2011\/01\/12\/why-chinese-mothers-are-average-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Chinese Mothers Are Average, Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

For the record, the title of this post deliberately does not say that Chinese mothers are\u00a0mediocre<\/em>. \u00a0Chinese mothers are average<\/em> parents because they, just like mothers in every culture on every continent, do some things right and some things wrong. \u00a0Also for the record: my Chinese-American mother-in-law is a fantastic parent, far more balanced than the mythical \u201cChinese mother,\u201d and I say that not only because I need her babysitting help. \u00a0It\u2019s actually true.<\/p>\n

Amy Chua\u2019s Why Chinese Mothers are Superior<\/a> (extra background here<\/a>) has stirred impassioned dialogue. \u00a0Insulting people\u2019s parenting, and telling them (let\u2019s not kid ourselves) that their children are inferior, is just about the surest and swiftest way to enrage them. \u00a0Yes, the smug sense of superiority, the rampant stereotyping, and the cartoonish western=bad and Chinese=good attitude, are infuriating. \u00a0But there actually are<\/em> lessons to be learned here if each side is humble enough to listen.\u00a0An arrogant my-way-is-better-than-yours will create a lot more heat than light. \u00a0So let\u2019s discuss this with humility.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Amy Chua with her daughters in Connecticut<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I am going to break this series into three parts. \u00a0Part 1 will examine the problems\u2013and they are many and grave\u2013in the way Amy Chua has framed the issue. \u00a0Part 2 will consider what \u201cwestern\u201d parents might learn from \u201cChinese\u201d parenting methods. \u00a0And Part 3 will consider what \u201cChinese\u201d parents might learn from \u201cwestern\u201d methods.<\/p>\n

First, some qualifiers. \u00a0Although I am not of Chinese descent, I know something about the subject. \u00a0I grew up with Asian-American best friends in the San Francisco Bay Area; my sister is adopted Korean; I belonged to, and led, predominantly Asian-American Christian fellowships at Stanford and Harvard; I married an extraordinary Chinese-American woman and have belonged to a wonderful Chinese-American family (and its extended community in Atlanta) for ten years; I\u2019ve spent two summers in China; and I pastored a Chinese-American youth group in Princeton, New Jersey, for three years.<\/p>\n

Also, I do not write the following out of any sense of envy or inferiority. \u00a0It would be churlish to list my academic and extra-curricular accomplishments, but\u00a0find them here<\/a> if you require proof\u00a0that I\u2019m not just seeking to justify my own mediocrity.<\/p>\n

Finally, I am responding to Chua\u2019s piece in the WSJ. \u00a0Her book may be more nuanced.<\/p>\n

With these qualifiers in hand, let\u2019s proceed. \u00a0In this Part 1 of my response to Chua, I want to deal with\u2026<\/p>\n

FRAMING PROBLEMS<\/strong><\/p>\n

1. \u00a0Employing a false dichotomy<\/em>. \u00a0One of the silliest parts of Chua\u2019s argument is her steadfast refusal to consider that there might be a happy middle between the strict, controlling, stifling \u201cChinese mother\u201d and the lazy, permissive \u201cwestern parent.\u201d \u00a0She might refuse to consider a third way because (a) it would imply that she might have something to learn from the western model, (b) it would imply that the \u201cChinese mother\u201d model has flaws, (c) it would make for a less controversial (and probably far less profitable) book, (d) she\u2019s a true believer in the Chinese mother model, and\/or (e) all of the above. \u00a0My money\u2019s on (e).<\/p>\n

The best parents know when to challenge their children and when to comfort them, when to discipline and when to show mercy, when to give strong direction and when to give their children the freedom to follow their hearts. \u00a0Yet Chua shoves the \u201cwestern parent\u201d and \u201cChinese mother\u201d to their extremes and evacuates the rich and expansive territory in between. \u00a0This would be like saying \u201cA quarterback who can throw is better than a quarterback who can run.\u201d \u00a0Well, perhaps, but what about a quarterback who can do both, and who knows when to throw and when to run?<\/p>\n

2. \u00a0Trafficking in inaccurate stereotypes<\/em>. \u00a0I agree with Chua that westerners can be over-squeamish about stereotypes, and that stereotypes often do reflect genuine statistical differences. \u00a0(Actually, the typical \u201cwestern\u201d objection to stereotypes is not that they have no basis in accurate generalizations, but that they are too often used to judge an individual by the racial\/socio-economic\/gender group to which they belong.) \u00a0But Chua\u2019s use of stereotypes is misleading. \u00a0First, (a) the parenting model she describes is more accurately described as Chinese-American<\/em> than Chinese. \u00a0It bears the imprint of the immigrant experience. \u00a0The study she cites at the beginning\u2013the only non-anecdotal evidence she offers\u2013refers to \u201cChinese immigrant mothers.\u201d \u00a0This is very important because of Framing Problem #4, below. \u00a0(b) It is beyond ridiculous to refer to a singular \u201cwestern\u201d parenting model, given the multiplicity of ethnic groups in America (which is just one western country) and the multiplicity of parenting approaches even within a single ethnic group. \u00a0(c) Given how few\u00a0Chinese or Chinese-American mothers are as extreme as Chua describes, and how few \u201cwestern\u201d parents are as \u201cwestern\u201d as she describes, it\u2019s not even helpful to use those terms. \u00a0It unnecessarily racializes and nationalizes the argument.<\/p>\n

3. \u00a0A narrow definition of success<\/em>. \u00a0Chua assumes we all agree on what equals \u201csuccess\u201d for our children, and the only question is how such success is achieved. \u00a0Success on her terms means producing \u201cmath whizzes and music prodigies\u201d who earn straight-A\u2019s and attend the highest-ranked universities and become affluent doctors or engineers or investment bankers. \u00a0This is easily understandable given the immigrant experience, which is often characterized by financial insecurity and a desperate desire to be publicly successful in their adopted society. \u00a0But it is not the only image of success, and perhaps not the best one.<\/p>\n

My parents\u2019 view of success\u2013for themselves as parents and for me as an individual\u2013was for me to be a good person who loves others and loves God. \u00a0They didn\u2019t much care how much money I made, or how prestigious the school I attended. \u00a0And they\u2019re not alone. \u00a0Many American parents just want to raise children who are happy, healthy and able to provide for themselves and enjoy their families. \u00a0We only have 80 years on this rock; our grades and our diplomas and even our piano skills really don\u2019t count for much. \u00a0And for those who believe in an eternal life beyond this one, everything else necessarily pales in comparison to the importance of securing our eternal future.<\/p>\n

Chua\u2019s response could be that you find happiness and satisfaction in excellence and achievement. \u00a0And that\u2019s certainly one path to fulfillment. \u00a0But it\u2019s not the only one, and it\u2019s not the surest one, either. \u00a0Some parents would be mortified to see their children become socially-isolated, one-dimensional engineers, no matter how financially secure they might be. \u00a0They would rather see their children live lives of faith, of family, of purpose, of creativity and self-expression, of justice and service, or etc.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s the point: Chua is assuming one vision of the Good and how to achieve it, and she shows no awareness whatsoever that different families run the race differently because they\u2019re pursuing different objects. \u00a0\u201cWestern\u201d parenting models often emphasize the development of different skills and character qualities because they are based on a different vision of what \u201csuccess\u201d means for the children and for the parent.<\/p>\n

4. \u00a0The pool of Chinese-Americans is highly self-selective<\/em>. \u00a0For proof of the effectiveness of Chinese parenting, Chua points to the Chinese-American reputation for academic achievement and entering high-paying professions. \u00a0And it is true that Asian-American children have higher grade point averages, higher average SAT scores, and enter high-paying professions at higher rates. \u00a0The question is whether this performance is due to (a) a superior genetic inheritance, (b) a cultural inheritance that strongly emphasizes education and achievement, or (c) because Asian-Americans tend in the first place to be the best and brightest that Asia has to offer. \u00a0I don\u2019t see any reason to believe (a). \u00a0I believe in (b) to an extent, but (c) is a huge factor.<\/p>\n

A large percentage of Chinese-Americans (especially Mandarin speakers) became Chinese-Americans<\/em> precisely because they were the elite within their own country. \u00a0Back when the American economy was the envy of the world, we used to talk about a \u201cbrain drain.\u201d \u00a0America was drawing the best and the brightest from around the world, especially from Asia. \u00a0In other words, a very high percentage of those highly-successful young Asian-Americans have parents who came to the United States for graduate school\u2013because they were smart enough, ambitious enough, and resourceful enough to win entry to, and travel around the world to attend, American graduate and professional programs. \u00a0Of course that<\/em> kind of parent is more like to produce those<\/em> kinds of children. \u00a0Go to China, as I have, and you find a much higher percentage of Chinese who are just as undisciplined, unambitious and intellectually mediocre as the stereotypical American.<\/p>\n

An earlier generation of immigrants (in the late 1800s and early 1900s) from China were more often from the lower classes, and entered menial labor jobs. \u00a0Due to dramatic social, historical and political changes, immigrants in the 1960s-1980s came to the United States because they had the means, the values and the abilities that are needed to travel around the world, enter prestigious graduate and professional degree programs, and start building flourishing lives for themselves. \u00a0It was not necessarily the political or economic super-elite, who often had more motive to stay and less motive to leave their home country. \u00a0But it was the top 1% in intellectual terms (consider that only 1% of Chinese get to go to college in the first place, not to mention entering American graduate or professional degree programs), or those who\u00a0had the highest earning potential if they could move to a country that rewarded initiative and smarts.<\/p>\n

Look at it this way. \u00a0If you were to peel off the intellectual top 1% of Americans and send them to, say, Australia, they too would prove to raise remarkably successful children. \u00a0Or imagine that the only Tanzanians who got to come to America were those who could earn basketball scholarships, and then a sociologist decided to compare the basketball skills between the next generation of Tanzanian-Americans and the next generation of Caucasian-Americans. \u00a0In the Caucasian-American category are children of parents who had all levels of basketball skill, but in the Tanzanian-American category are only children of those who had the skills and qualities to earn basketball scholarships. \u00a0It\u2019s really not a fair comparison.<\/p>\n

Chua herself is a Yale professor. \u00a0Compared to the children of Americans in general, her daughters (who, I must say, look and sound like lovely young women<\/a>) are outstandingly impressive. \u00a0Compared to the children of other Yale professors, they are impressive but not especially unusual. \u00a0The best comparison is not between Asian-Americans and Caucasian-Americans, but between Asian-Americans and other Americans in the same academic and socio-economic categories<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Along these lines, probably the best comparison is between Asian-Americans and Jewish Americans. \u00a0American Jews also tend to value education, achieve high levels of educational attainment, and enter into prestigious professions\u2013and their children, like Asian-American children, also tend to do very well in college and the early careers\u2013without the extremely strict and coercive parenting methods Chua describes. <\/em>So if Chua thinks that these methods are necessary to produce children who are \u201csuccessful\u201d according to her terms, I think she is demonstrably incorrect.<\/p>\n

5. \u00a0A lack of perspective<\/em>. \u00a0As Socrates taught, nobody can say whether a person\u2019s life has been well-lived until that person dies. \u00a0Presumably Chua would agree that parents should do their best to equip their children for an entire lifetime of \u201csuccess\u201d and fulfillment\u2013but her daughters are still young and it remains to be seen whether they will flourish or regress as the years go on, or how else they might suffer as a consequence of their mother\u2019s parenting methods.<\/p>\n

I will go into this more in the next installment of this series, but I have known many children subjected to these kinds of parenting methods who, once they had escaped from their mothers, lost their sense of purpose and motivation, threw themselves into self-destructive behaviors, or even lapsed into severe depression and multiple suicide attempts. \u00a0I have also known many who performed well enough in college and early in their professional careers, but never developed socially and remained caught in a kind of suspended adolescence, failing to form families and spending all their non-working hours playing video games.<\/p>\n

Time will tell whether Chua\u2019s daughters\u2013or more generally whether Chinese-American children\u2013are more prone to: (a) feel deeply estranged from their parents due to anger and resentment over how they were treated, (b) suffer anxiety and depression as their parents so controlled their lives that they never quite learned to deal with life\u2019s uncertainties and responsibilities for themselves, (c) suffer social alienation because their social development was stunted, (d) prove less successful professionally than their peers because the workplace rewards the kinds of social and teamwork skills that are developed in sports and in the pursuit of a social life,\u00a0or because they did not learn to think for themselves and color outside the lines, (e) suffer eating disorders (I have known many, many young Chinese-American women with eating disorders, and they absolutely hate it when the older generation calls them \u201cfat\u201d) as a consequence of their parents\u2019 comments, or as a way to try to control their world, (f) have difficult forming happy families, or (g) generally find their lives empty and unenjoyable because they never learned how to relax and enjoy the recreation for which we were intended.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most profoundly, as many young Chinese-Americans have observed in books, Chinese-American youth have an especially hard time understanding divine grace because they were raised in households where love was expressed so conditionally. \u00a0I am not aware whether Chua is Christian; I assume not. \u00a0But for Christian families, this should be a great concern. \u00a0Shortly after I began attending the Chinese-American church in Princeton, I overheard a mother actually tell her young (around 8 year-old) daughter that \u201cJesus will love you more if you do better in school.\u201d \u00a0As plain as that.<\/p>\n

Certainly Chinese-Americans who were raised in such households can still come to a deep understanding of the grace of God. \u00a0But it\u2019s tough. \u00a0And that sense, that hunch, that God will only love them if they perform up to expectations, and that nothing they do is ever good enough for God, comes directly from their relationship with their parents. \u00a0And it may well haunt them the rest of their lives. \u00a0For example, there is a tendency amongst the Amy Chuas, when a child apologizes, to use that guilt to manipulate the child into better behavior. \u00a0Your sins against your parents are never quite forgiven or forgotten; they are used to guilt you into being better. \u00a0I saw this haunting many of the Chinese-American youth to whom I ministered. \u00a0They never quite believed that they were forgiven by God. \u00a0And consequently they could not follow God simply out of joy and gratitude, but had to follow God because they felt like they were always disappointing him, and he always had something against them.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to believe that God looks at you and sees Christ when your own mother looks at you and calls you \u201cgarbage.\u201d<\/p>\n

So while Chua stands proudly in the WSJ picture and goes to great lengths to congratulate herself on raising such \u201csuccessful\u201d daughters, she really has no idea what might be the long-term consequences of the way in which she raised her children.<\/p>\n

These, then, were the problems in the way in which Chua\u2019s argument was framed. \u00a0She presented a false dichotomy between an extremely strict (\u201cChinese\u201d) parenting method and an extremely permissive (\u201cwestern\u201d) one; she based that dichotomy on dubious stereotypes; she offered a surprisingly superficial argument that never once reflects deeply on the meaning of \u201csuccess\u201d (indeed it is striking how completely she has bought into one western materialistic vision of success); she based her theory on the successes of Chinese-American youth, whose successes are at least largely explained in other ways; and she does not possess the perspective even to say that she has been successful on her own terms. \u00a0When all of these problems are taken into mind, her argument as a whole is much less compelling.<\/p>\n

Still, in the next part of this series, I will consider what her so-called \u201cChinese\u201d parenting methods really do have to teach the rest of us. \u00a0And there are some valuable lessons to learn.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the record, the title of this post deliberately does not say that Chinese mothers are\u00a0mediocre. \u00a0Chinese mothers are average parents because they, just like mothers in every culture on every continent, do some things right and some things wrong. \u00a0Also for the record: my Chinese-American mother-in-law is a fantastic parent, far more balanced than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-parenting"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy Chinese Mothers Are Average, Part 1 - Philosophical Fragments<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"For the record, the title of this post deliberately does not say that Chinese mothers are\u00a0mediocre. \u00a0Chinese mothers are average parents because they,\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/philosophicalfragments\/2011\/01\/12\/why-chinese-mothers-are-average-part-1\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why Chinese Mothers Are Average, Part 1 - 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