“So far as parenting is concerned, a firm hand works best when paired with a warm embrace.”
It is better to aim to raise children who are happy, confident and kind — and not necessarily as driven, dutiful and successful. In the process, if we are raising fewer future virtuoso violinists and neurosurgeons, so be it
In first grade, I arrived at my suburban elementary school as a sort of academic vaudeville trickster. My classmates stood speechless as I absorbed thick tomes on medieval history, wrote and presented research reports, and breezed through fifth-grade math problems like a bored teenager.
My teachers anointed me a genius, but I knew the truth. My non-Asian friends hadn’t spent hours marching through the snow, reciting multiplication tables. They hadn’t stood at attention at the crack of dawn reading the newspaper aloud, with each stumble earning a stinging rebuke. Like a Navy SEAL thrown into a pool of raw conscripts, at 6, I had spent much of my conscious life training for this moment.
To my authoritarian father all has gone according to plan. I excelled in school, attending Amherst College and Harvard Law School. I’ve embraced his conventional vision of success: I’m a lawyer. But like many second-generation immigrant overachievers, I’ve spent decades struggling with the paradox of my upbringing. Were the same childhood experiences that long evoked my resentment also responsible for my academic and professional achievements? And if so, was the trade-off between happiness and success worth it?
The way I and other Asian-Americans of my generation answer these questions could affect American society more broadly. My generation’s academic success has sparked a crisis of sorts in America’s elite educational institutions. When I became a parent, I felt the wonder and uncertainty that accompany the awesome responsibility of fatherhood. But I was absolutely sure of one thing: The childhood I devise for my two young daughters will look nothing like mine. They will feel valued and supported. They will know home as a place of joy and fun. They will never wonder whether their father’s love is conditioned on an unblemished report card.
I’ve assumed this means my daughters might someday bring home grades or make life choices that my father would have regarded as failures. If so, I embrace the decline.
During my constitutional law class, Akhil Amar — the only Asian-American professor I’ve ever had — asked for a show of hands: Whose parents immigrated to the United States after 1965? I joined all the other Asian students in raising my hand, along with a few white compatriots with hard-to-pronounce last names. As Amar explained, our American story was made possible by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, a groundbreaking statute that washed away a century of laws, like the frankly named Chinese Exclusion Act, aimed at making sure people like us never became Americans.
In the decades that followed, a large wave of Asian immigrants arrived in the US. Like my parents, many of these new arrivals brought two cultural values that would carry their children far: A near-religious devotion to education as the key to social mobility and a belief that academic achievement depends mostly on effort rather than inborn ability. Many (though certainly not all, and probably less than half) also came armed with the belief that the best way to instil these values is through harsh methods that other Americans can regard as cruel.
Masking diversity
The results have been striking. Today, Asian-Americans fill the nation’s top universities in staggering numbers, enter elite professions like medicine at incredible rates (nearly 20 per cent of new doctors have Asian roots) and generally do better in school and make more money than any other demographic slice. Although overall trends mask vast diversity within our community, now 20 million strong, as a group we’ve broken the curve on standard metrics of success.
Because of pre-1965 immigration restrictions, the third-generation stories of most Asian-American families have yet to be written. Today, many second-generation Americans like me are at a parenting crossroads: Do we replicate the severe, controlling parenting styles many of us were raised with — methods that we often assume shaped our own success?
Amy Chua famously answered this question yes. In her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, she explained that her fanatical parenting choices were driven by the desire to avoid “family decline.” But most second-generation Asian-Americans are not joining her. Rather, studies show that we’re largely abandoning traditional Asian parenting styles in favour of a modern, Western approach focused on developing open and warm relationships with our children.
My wife is also a second-generation Asian-American overachiever (she’s a doctor, the other immigrantparent-approved profession), and together we’re trying to instil in our daughters the same grit and reverence for learning that our upbringings gave us, but in a happy and supportive home environment. (In this effort, we’ve followed the example of her parents, whose unfailing kindness is also common among Asian immigrants, proving it’s possible to have it both ways.) We’ve also adopted the relationship-driven mindset common among young parents today but not among most immigrant parents, who emphasise discipline. For example, before my oldest daughter was on an early-morning school schedule, I freely indulged her disregard for bedtime on a condition: The night was firmly earmarked for learning. We’d sometimes stay up past midnight, lying on our stomachs with feet in the air, huddled over a dry-erase board and a bowl of popcorn, practising phonics or learning about sea creatures. My own father, by contrast, strictly policed bedtime, angrily shutting down my attempts to hide under the sheets with a book and a flashlight.
Loving respect, not fearful obedience
Studies on second-generation parenting also show that many of us are striving to cultivate individuality and autonomy in our children in a way that we feel was missing from our own childhoods. As the respondent in one study explained: “As a young adult, I really struggled with what I wanted to do. I was always told that I would be a doctor and so I never had a chance to really look outside of that and if I did, it wasn’t nurtured at all.” With her own children, she said, “We try to expose them to everything under the sun and then home in on the things that excite them, what they like.”
The traditional Asian parenting model is, in theory at least, premised on imposing pain now to reap meritocratic rewards later. For much of my life, I accepted this premise and assumed there must be a trade-off between inculcating academic success and happiness. But as I’ve learnt since becoming a parent, the research shows that children tend to do best, across the board, when parents command loving respect, not fearful obedience — when they are both strict and supportive, directive and kind-hearted.
By contrast, children subjected to hostile “tiger” parenting methods are more likely to be depressed, anxious and insecure. And while many tiger cubs run the gauntlet and emerge as academic gladiators, on an average, children subjected to high-pressure parenting actually tend to do worse in school. In short, a firm hand works best when paired with a warm embrace. This is the approach I’ve tried to take with my daughters.
Like all parents, however, my failures stack up alongside my successes. And I know that the decision to abandon immigrant parenting principles could backfire. The striving immigrant mindset, however severe, can produce results. Every time I snuggle my daughters as they back away from a challenge — when my own father would have screamed and spit and spanked until I prevailed — I wonder if I’m failing them in a very different way than he did me.
But I’m temperamentally unable to mimic my father’s succeed-at-all-costs immigrant mindset, an instinct I share with most of my generation. And maybe that marks our immigrant parents’ ultimate triumph: We have become American. As part of the American parenting mainstream, I aim to raise children who are happy, confident and kind — and not necessarily as driven, dutiful and successful as the model Asian child. If that means the next generation will have fewer virtuoso violinists and neurosurgeons, well, I still embrace the decline.
The traditional Asian parenting model is, in theory at least, premised on imposing pain now to reap meritocratic rewards later. For much of my life, I accepted this premise and assumed there must be a trade-off between inculcating academic success and happiness.
Every time I snuggle my daughters as they back away from a challenge — when my own father would have screamed and spit and spanked until I prevailed — I wonder if I’m failing them in a very different way than he did me.