We are in a heavily "Tiger Mom" area. My son's best friend in third grade is Chinese and goes to Chinese school each week, one hour violin, and 2 hours piano every day! The boy seems heavily depressed all of the time. He is not a dumb kid but not as smart, probably, as his parents hope he is. I just don't think it is worth it to make your child so profoundly miserable all of the time like that.
I agree with you that it is brutal for the child. But I suspect you misunderstand the reason why it happens. I will explain this using some statistics and tying to an article I read from The Economist about two years ago.
The statistics show that selective colleges, in an effort to promote "diversity", demand different levels of achievement from each race. A recent Business Week article quoted a Princeton sociologist named Thomas Espenshade. He wrote in 2009 that on an 1600 point SAT test, if all other credentials are equal, an Asian American needed to score 140 points more than whites, 270 points more than Hispanics, and 450 points more than Arfican-Americans to have an equal chance of admission to a private school.
The Economist article from two years ago is called Sex and the Single Black Woman. Here is the opening paragraph:
"IMAGINE that the world consists of 20 men and 20 women, all of them heterosexual and in search of a mate. Since the numbers are even, everyone can find a partner. But what happens if you take away one man? You might not think this would make much difference. You would be wrong, argues Tim Harford, a British economist, in a book called The Logic of Life. With 20 women pursuing 19 men, one woman faces the prospect of spinsterhood. So she ups her game. Perhaps she dresses more seductively. Perhaps she makes an extra effort to be obliging. Somehow or other, she “steals” a man from one of her fellow women. That newly single woman then ups her game, too, to steal a man from someone else. A chain reaction ensues. Before long, every woman has to try harder, and every man can relax a little."
Back to the tiger mom issue. The tiger mom knows her child has to compete against other highly capable Asian kids for entry into selective college. So she tries to up her child's game by seeking the highest academic and extracurricular achievements. Other Asians notice this too, and soon there is an arms race for achievements. The Supreme court has recently agreed to hear a Texas case on racial discrimination in selective colleges. It will be interesting to see the outcome.
PS: This last bit is off topic, but the Economist article also suggests implications about sending daughters to colleges where the majority of students are women. Would the less attractive college women who "upped their game" also force a chain reaction there?
