MCLC: scholarly response to tiger mom

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: scholarly response to tiger mom
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Source: Sinopshere blog, NYT (5/23/14):
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/a-scholarly-response-to-tige
r-mom-happiness-matters-too/

A Scholarly Response to ‘Tiger Mom’: Happiness Matters, Too
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

It’s a joke among parents in Beijing — where people are acutely aware of
the differences between China and the United States and where there are
many mixed-culture families and styles of parenting — that when a child
scores 99 on a test, an American parent will lavish praise. But a Chinese
parent will say: “What happened? Why didn’t you get 100?”

That anecdotally observed difference is the subject of a new report by
four respected child development experts comparing Chinese and American
parenting, and looking at which achieves more. It focuses not just on
academic success but also on emotional well-being, and it rates them
equally. In other words: Academic achievement matters, but so does
happiness.

“Raising Happy Children Who Succeed in School: Lessons From China and the
United States,” published in the June issue of the journal Child
Development Perspectives
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdep.2014.8.issue-2/issuetoc>,
can perhaps be seen as an academic response to “Tiger Mom.” That’s the
style of parenting popularized by the Asian-American author Amy Chua, who
lauded, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the academic-achievement-at-all-costs
approach of Asian and Asian-American parents in her book “Battle Hymn of
the Tiger Mother.”

The scholars’ conclusion, carefully phrased and drawing on three dozen
research studies: While high-pressure, high-control “Tiger Mom” parenting
does yield better academic results, especially in math and science, it may
also produce “dampened happiness” and “dampened emotional functioning” in
children.

“Given dampened feelings of worth and happiness among Chinese, we point to
the costs of the Chinese style for children’s emotional functioning,”
write the authors, Eva M. Pomerantz and Yang Qu of the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Florrie Fei-Yin Ng of the Chinese University
of Hong Kong and Cecilia Sin-Sze Cheung of the University of California,
Riverside. And they warn, “We diverge from the perspective that Americans
should adopt the Chinese style.”

What are the major differences? First, the researchers say, Chinese
parents, whether they live in China or the United States, “are more
involved in children’s learning than American parents, beginning as early
as preschool.” That alone teaches children to value learning more, leading
them to perform better, they say.

At the same time, “Chinese parents tend to be more controlling in general
in that they pressure children, such that they regulate their feelings,
thoughts and behaviors more than American parents.”

American parents, by contrast, focus on building their children’s autonomy.

Chinese parents focus more on failure. As the authors put it, “Chinese
parents place less emphasis on children’s success (e.g. by praising
children less) than American parents, concentrating instead on children’s
mistakes.”

Chinese parents are more likely to tell their children, “You only got six
out of 12?” than to say, “You are so smart!” as American parents do, the
authors say.

When Chinese children fail, their parents talk about how they lack ability
or effort, the researchers say. When American children fail, their parents
“minimize it (e.g. by attending to what the children did right.)”

In other words: Chinese moms really do tend toward being critical and
controlling, whereas American moms really do tend toward being — perhaps
irrationally — supportive. (And dads, too, for that matter — the authors
do not distinguish.)

But the Chinese style “predicts enhanced achievement among children,”
meaning higher grades. “The gap is unlikely to be superficial,” the
authors write, with Chinese children strongly motivated by their parents’
attitudes, which gives them “an edge.”

The American style, for its part, can produce “enhanced emotional
functioning,” they say.

“In the United States, although academic functioning is valued, so are
other types of functioning, with parents emphasizing the well-rounded
child,” they write.

Which leads to the question: Can the two styles be integrated for optimum
results?

The authors seem cautious about this possibility, pointing out that
parenting is deeply rooted in culture and tends to be part of a package
from which it is hard to extract or mix elements at will.

But if you could, what would such parenting look like?

“Parents would be highly involved in children’s learning, but in an
autonomy-supportive, rather than controlling, manner that facilitated
children’s development academically and emotionally,” they write. “This
would mean less control in China and more involvement in the United
States.”