The argument against tiger moms

[the_tyrant]

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/10/opinion/keltner-tiger-mom/index.html?iid=article_sidebar



(CNN) -- When I was a kid, I was obedient and quiet. I automatically knew that talking too loud, making a fuss or being assertive would never fly. I did what I was told.
I was a Chinese girl.
I adhered to my parents' wishes that I get top grades and perform well in the activities they had chosen for me.
But after all the hours of homework, grueling afternoons of practicing arpeggios on the piano to perfection, four hours of Chinese school after regular school, Chinese calligraphy lessons with the stiff brush and stinky ink, after the chores, basketball practice and memorization of Chinese poems, eventually I wanted to feel known for myself, not just my accomplishments.


You know what, if I had kids, I would not be an obsessive tiger/helicopter parent. Because after all, spend 18 years obsessing over your kid, only for them to get into a good university so they can come out with a slightly higher paying job.

If I'm going to obsess over my kid for 18 years, he should better come out as the next agent 47, or at the very least, be able to count cards.

[MH]

Tiger parenting seems like a way to kill tiger spirit in my opinion.

[AVGWarhawk]

A child seems to lose being a child when their lives are regimented in this way. IMO.

[Skybird]

This education style does not fly in our culture anyway, not if driven to such obsessive extremes. Since a long time, individualism and collectivism are being seen very different in Asia and the West.

However, what the total laissez-faire left-leaning pedagogues in Germany want - no schoolnotes, no differentiation made between different skills of children, if children do not meet classroom goals then solving the problem by lowering the demands, and finding sociological excuses for every misbehaviour and even criminal and violant acts - cannot be the solution.

Children and juveniles need freedom, but also they need boundaries and limits set up to them, borders they are not allowed to pass. This is needed last but not least to given them the chances to not only define themselves by wishes what they want to see themselves as - the great persuasion of dilettantism - but also by rubbing and rattling with and against these limits and and boundaries, and by that realising what they can - and what not. It also helps to learn that nothing is for free except the love of one's parents, and that from nothing comes nothing.

If I had children, they maybe to some degrees would be given even greater freedoms of some kind than what I see in befriended families, and hear from them about other families they know - but I also would set up some principle rules that maybe would be even surprisingly sparse, but would be non-negotiable. Where there are rights, the older one gets the more there will be duties. I believe in both freedom and being relaxed - but that being paired with discipline. No discipline of a character-breaking point. I mean constructive, excesses-avoiding discipline, and goal-orientation. And understanding causal links between action and consequence, targets one sets for oneself - and the needed action to acquire them.

So Tiger-Moms? Not with me. Anti-authoritarian education? Not with me. Relativising of skills, talents, and performances, and even negation of differences in children in the name of "social equality" ? Not with me.

Modern times and the many books and idiotic texts on education and how to be a perfect mother or father, have turned parents into clueless fools quite often, whose demands of what they dream of as a future for their children often skyrocket high into the heavens nevertheless. Well, nobody gets born as a parent, but when having gotten babies, people, at least most people I'd say, learned by the process to become good parents nevertheless. It seems to me that this natural learning process today gets messed up and even prevented in many, and gets replaced by books' and magazines' and ideologists' input instead.

Freedom AND discipline, a sometimes difficult balancing act. That is the trick, I think.

[Platapus]

I always thought that Tigers eat their young so I was confused at the thread title. LoL

[Jimbuna]

A child seems to lose being a child when their lives are regimented in this way. IMO.

Rgr that...cut them a bit of slack and they'll often flourish as a result.

[AVGWarhawk]

Rgr that...cut them a bit of slack and they'll often flourish as a result.

I agree. If anyone has read the instructions for planting a flower or shrub it is always advised to dig the hole twice the size of the pot the plant was purchased in. When giving the roots this space it will grow and flourish.

[Herr-Berbunch]

I'm disappointed that a tiger mom isn't anything like a cougar. :cry:

I believe in balance, our kids can watch TV - but they have to do a chore first unless everyone and watching. They have no TV in the bedrooms. They can choose what subjects they like. Computer time is also limited, but they can have the phone as much as they like. If they want to eat rubbish food they buy it themselves from their pocket money, we provide good food (mostly).

I think we're lucky that the kids like education, with the eldest about to embark to college to study physics, chemistry, maths and further maths - when nagged by his mum to do something for fun he replied that the further maths was for fun. :-? :)

If my wife was a tiger mom I'd divorce her.