January 18, 2011

• controversy

  So this article on Asian parenting by Amy Chua has been making the rounds through the papers, blogs, Facebook, and just about every other venue for debate. She tries to keep things light, but for most of us who were raised this way, the article rang true. There was some initial amusement, a feeling of recognition: “Yeah, that’s the same kind of crappy childhood my parents inflicted on me!” which then transitioned into resentment and frustration: “Yeah, that’s the same kind of crappy childhood my parents inflicted on me.”

  I’ve participated in a few discussions, and my feelings about the topic, initial joking aside, are really mixed. Other people have written long and detailed responses and articles about this, so I won’t go into great detail. This is just what I think about my own experience.

  On one hand, I am grateful to my parents for pushing me to do things that I wouldn’t have been motivated to do — by forcing me to do well when I was younger, they made it much easier for me to do well as I’ve gotten older. Getting straight A’s and participating in every single extracurricular activity with the single-minded goal of getting in college has its benefits, the main one of which is that you get into the best college you could possibly get into. Going to Harvard (which happened almost completely because of the passive-aggressive and sometimes plain aggressive parenting that my parents used to extract high performance from me) was awesome while I was there, and it has made the rest of my life infinitely easier. I will always have a job and money and security, and it’s because my parents made me do things I didn’t want to do when I was young. I appreciate that, and I enjoy the benefits of it every day.

  On the other hand, I don’t like my parents. I love them and respect everything that they have done, and I have a dutiful kind of attachment to them, but I think that this parenting style builds walls between parents and children. I will never tell my mom any secrets, except for some kind of strategic gain. I call them every weekend out of a sense of obligation, not because I enjoy the conversations. I have visited their home, where I lived until I left for college, only once in the last 7.5 years, and even then, it was out of guilt and obligation, and not out of a desire for any kind of homecoming. In establishing themselves as taskmasters over my life, they also removed any idea that I might have had of them as friends. I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing, as I have found my friends elsewhere — parents just need to know that when they take a certain path in raising their children, there is often an inverse relationship between the number of rules and regulations that they set and enforce, and the level of positive emotions they will receive back from their children. If high achievement is the goal, and you don’t need your daughter to be your best friend, then there is no conflict. The problem only arises (as it has with my mother) when you spend decades telling your child that she has no free will, that she is a failure and a disappointment, and that she isn’t good enough, and then one day wonder why she isn’t your best friend.

  The other point that people have been raising is that this style of parenting can have very high stakes. It’s a big gamble with your child’s life — if you’re lucky, you can end up with an extremely successful overachiever who probably has some mommy issues, but is otherwise living a charmed life. If you’re not lucky, you can either end up with a less-successful rebel who hates you, or you can end up with a dead kid. Just because your child falls into one of those categories now doesn’t mean that she won’t find herself in a different one a year from now — these paths diverge and converge and intersect without warning. I think that today is actually the 9th anniversary of the day I got out of the hospital, and even now, I remain firmly convinced that if I don’t die from some unforeseen disease or accident, this is what will kill me in the end. Being raised to believe that the options are either total victory or total defeat really messes with your mind, and things can just add up, and what might seem like a perfectly acceptable state of existence for 99% of the population can still sometimes look like humiliating, unacceptable defeat, and if you’re wired to believe that your self-worth is completely tied into whether you “won” or not, the world can sometimes look like an overwhelming collection of an infinite number of ways to fail.

  Failure is still my greatest fear, and as I grow older, it becomes harder to define success and failure, and it becomes even harder to figure out if I’m succeeding or failing. When faced with that uncertainty, I tend to assume that I’m failing. Without a clear picture of what success would look like, it’s hard to figure out how to stop failing. Sometimes, job + money + boyfriend + house + dog feels like success, but when it feels like failure, I have no idea what to fix to make it feel like success.

  I don’t plan on ever having children. I am selfish and want to spend my time and money and attention on my own interests. Beyond that, however, I don’t want to have to be responsible for another person’s life, and I don’t want to have to make those choices that will determine whether that person succeeds and whether she will resent me and whether my attempt to give her a leg up in life will kill her. I also don’t want to avoid making those tough choices and then have her wonder why I didn’t help her succeed when I could.

  • 1:39 pm
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