Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy more on "Chinese" moms

I try to get mine into extras so that he is around other kids and adults. It is just DS9 and I. This is a chance for him to be around men. One of the scout dads took him off and taught him to toss the football. I just can't do it, I throw and catch like a girl b/c i am. We are also so dependent on each other, it makes him trust and interact with others that it's not all about us. we do alot of the learning history and science things but scouts has been wonderful. It pushes both of us out of our comfort zones, I hate camping and have bad knees. Off my little man goes hiking up hills and trying rope bridges while I relax.

FWIW, I had dinner the other night with the only real Chinese mom that I know. Her daughter is my daughter's best friend. The mom grew up in mainland China under Chairman Mao and lived through the subsequent changes. She moved here about 13 years ago with her husband who is also Chinese. She said that when she grew up getting into good schools was political but that started to change when she got to high school. During her last two years, getting into a good school started to be a function of testing.

She said, "What we do to children now in China is terrible. Everything is about the test and that is how you get into good school. We don't allow our children to have a life. In China, they study until 10 o'clock at night. Everything is memorizing for the test. We did not want that for our children, that is why we came here."

Her children are involved in a lot of activities -- weekend Chinese school (language and cultural instruction), music (violin and flute), ice skating (figure and hockey), indoor soccer, theater, etc. She wants her children to have the opportunity to try the things that are not offered in school. She said that the only activity that is not optional is Chinese school because it is an important connection to their culture. She allows her kids to have sleepovers.

When I asked her what she thought of the "Chinese mom" article, she laughed. She pointed out that in China she would not have been allowed to have three children. She sees her two younger children in particular as her special gifts. She said that she would never treat her children that way. She said that she grew up in a culture were choices were very limited and school was very structured. She did not want that for her children. She thought maybe the article was more typical of American-born Chinese.

I'm a parent that can seem like a so-called "Chinese" parent...
we're not unschooling parents philosophically (though our child is home-educated), we value genuine excellence over faux-esteem-building gold-star-trophies-for-all culture, our child has a disability that requires constant oversight (ie-- we can seem very "controlling"), every member of my nuclear family is a volatile and outspoken type-A personality with an extra genetic helping of mouthy snark on the side, and we have a HG/PG child who is and has always been an e-ticket ride.

In other words, DD11 is stubborn as all get-out, most activities require a level of parental advocacy that seems extreme (it's for her safety), but she has the energy/time/ability to do many of the myriad things that she wants to accomplish-- and, so long as she actually follows through on her commitments, she still has plenty of time left over to do regular "kid" stuff like playing with sidewalk chalk and thinking about Pokemon. You know, once she's done evaluating opportunity costs of a business decision, and completing a critical essay on Othello or some such thing, but that's life as a HG/PG kid. When people meet her in person for the first time, they are mostly struck by just how normal and, I don't know, 'free' or relaxed, she is. And how relaxed WE are. You'd never know just how gifted she was by observing her doing normal 'kid' stuff, in other words. That's the way we like it-- and we have fought HARD to give her that slice of a normal childhood.

Our end of things is the "follow through" and "oh no, you don't" when she decides that playing computer games sounds like a lot more fun in the here and now than actually completing a paper that she needs to write for a high school course. "Half-a**ed" is what we don't tolerate from her there. So that aspect of Tiger-mothering I'm entirely on-board with. <shrug>




So are we pretty hard on her? Yes. But with love, and on an 'as-needed' basis. We never ask for more than she's capable of delivering, and we also never ask for more than is appropriate-- but the problem is that our demands probably SEEM like they are way out of line-- because for most 11yo kids, they sure would be.

For this 11yo, though? Not-so-much. She's most pleased when she has a LOT of demands placed on her. We assume that she's tough enough to weather most of what life throws her way. We just try to keep her from biting off more than she can chew. That's a moving target.

Listing all that she gets completed in a week would make most adults' heads spin. Learned the hard way that being frank about that tends to provoke the same kind of horror that I've seen in response to Amy Chua. We seem kind of hard-core like that, too, I think. My daughter'd like to think that being asked to clean her room is "abuse," that much I know... but like most parents, we just want to instill an understanding that work comes before play. Heh.


Is Amy Chua doing the wrong things with her kids? I have no idea. I don't know them, and I'm not a fly on the wall in her home. What I do know is that I'm not willing to dismiss it out of hand by using my own family's measuring stick against her parenting. It wouldn't be right for my daughter, and it's interesting to read about... but that's all I really know.

~The Karmic Howler Monkey

PS. LOL at "window math." We don't have a sliding glass door, so my DD has always stood on the back of our sofa and used our living room's huge picture windows. She used to beg me for dimensional analysis problems.

Oh-- and to add to that, since DD is educated at home, without "extra-curricular" activities, her social life would be pretty limited, as well. She's an only child.

Or first generation, maybe? I know that my friends growing up who were daughters of immigrants were parented much more strictly than their cousins who still lived in the country of origin.

I'm finally going to chime in on this one. I agree strongly with the posts that there is not One Way to raise our children. Every decision my husband and I make is based on our understanding of OUR son and how he reacts to situations. Sometimes that means he thinks we are unfair in our expectations of him compared to his friends. Other times, it means taking a longer view and accepting DS's limitations positively but with a long term plan to help them improve.

Since his school environment is not overly challenging academically but incredibly overwhelming to him on the organizational side, we do not let him get away with poorly thought out and executed assignments. However, we relax the bar when it comes to neatness of his locker and notebooks. Those are still a work in progress. We have standards he must meet for his organizational level, but as his parents we KNOW our son and understand that he does not have the executive function skills expected of a 6th grader yet.

DS does not respond at all positively to external pressure. The key with him is to figure out what will self motivate him to do his best in an activity or assignment. Extra activities outside of school, often teach him more about himself than anything he does in school. My intention for a least a few more years is that he always be involved in at least 1 creative activity, 1 physical activity and 1 music activity in addition to school. However, DS gets to choose the activities and may change them once a specific enrollment period is completed. Currently, he is enrolled in a Comedic Acting Class, Figure Skating and a Chorus.

I can't answer if he is over scheduled compared to any other child. For our son, this schedule works. He has activities several nights an week and on Saturday but he has Sunday and a couple days in the week without external activities to unwind or work on projects. In my opinion, his schedule helps him to stay more organized and has begun to teach him not to procrastinate and to use the time he has more efficiently.