Althouse: "In first grade, I arrived at my suburban elementary school as a sort of academic vaudeville trickster."

June 22, 2018

"In first grade, I arrived at my suburban elementary school as a sort of academic vaudeville trickster."

"My classmates stood speechless as I absorbed thick tomes on medieval history, wrote and presented research reports, and breezed through fifth-grade math problems like a bored teenager. My teachers anointed me a genius, but I knew the truth. My non-Asian friends hadn’t spent hours marching through the snow, reciting multiplication tables. They hadn’t stood at attention at the crack of dawn reading the newspaper aloud, with each stumble earning a stinging rebuke. Like a Navy SEAL thrown into a pool of raw conscripts, at 6, I had spent much of my conscious life training for this moment...."

The first 2 paragraphs of "The Last of the Tiger Parents" an op-ed by Ryan Park (NYT).

36 comments:

rehajm said...: Not smarter. Work harder...

-Tiger Mom; 6/22/18, 10:09 AM
Sebastian said...: Sure, 10,000 hours can take you farther, but IQ mostly determines how far you go.; 6/22/18, 10:24 AM
William said...: A while back, we were discussing how Asians have mastered classical music, and good for them. There are any number of first rate classical musicians, and Yo Yo Ma has, far and away, has the most memorable name of any classical musician ever. But here's my question: despite all these first rate musician why have the Asians not produced any well known composers?; 6/22/18, 10:31 AM
Comanche Voter said...: Ah So? That works for Asian kids. But children of stable middle and upper middle class families also have a tremendous advantage.Their parents talk to them, spend time with them, read to them, have books and magazines around the house. Head Start was a plausible idea, but is and was no substitute for that.

The worm in the modern apple is the rise of the tablet put in the hands of the smallest children. I don't know if the old model (stable family, reading material) works anymore.; 6/22/18, 10:32 AM
Expat(ish) said...: I used to say that MTV could fix the "Asian advantage" in two generations.

I don't think I got the right number on that.

-XC; 6/22/18, 10:45 AM
Fernandinande said...: Sebastian said...
Sure, 10,000 hours can take you farther, but IQ mostly determines how far you go.

The article was a morality tale about tough but wonderful parents and smart hardworking little kids, not a scientific paper about how parenting doesn't matter much and the smart hardworking little kid is that way because of his genes.; 6/22/18, 10:51 AM
fivewheels said...: "why have the Asians not produced any well known composers?"

For the same reason you would probably agree that there aren't women composers of historical note. Music just isn't made that way anymore. I don't know why, some mix of postmodernism and other 20th Century b.s.

Meanwhile, check out the current Japanese heavy metal scene, and compare it to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and you're getting somewhere. And I think a big part of that movement is Asian kids who were raised on learning to play instruments skillfully with classical training, and then turning to guitar-drums-bass.; 6/22/18, 10:51 AM
Gabriel said...: Funny how we never question the tiger-mom approach when the topic is athletics. We never say that thousands of hours spent in drills and rehearsing plays makes athletes less creative, or less socially well adjusted. We never say that athletes will be happier and more successful if they are not driven.; 6/22/18, 11:06 AM
Gabriel said...: Also we never characterize coaching, extra practice, sports camps, etc as "unfair advantages" to people who might like to be athletes but don't do these things.

I have always thought this difference was due to our culture believing that a) smart people are better people and b) that education and intelligence are essentially the same thing, or that intelligence is instilled and improved by education.; 6/22/18, 11:14 AM
Mountain Maven said...: Those abused children grow up to be unhappy underachieving drones. I saw it first hand in silicon valley before I escaped. I think the obsession with athletic success is bad too but most parents let their kids quit sports when they lose interest.; 6/22/18, 11:27 AM
mockturtle said...: By contrast, children subjected to hostile “tiger” parenting methods are more likely to be depressed, anxious and insecure.

Actually, the depressed, anxious and insecure children are those with liberal parents who impose few boundaries.; 6/22/18, 11:38 AM
readering said...: I like Lang Lang as a classical music name.; 6/22/18, 11:39 AM
mockturtle said...: Comanche voter asserts: Head Start was a plausible idea, but is and was no substitute for that.

IMO, Head Start was a social engineering effort that failed miserably.; 6/22/18, 11:40 AM
Mountain Maven said...: Embrace the power of "and."; 6/22/18, 11:44 AM
Henry said...: So Mr. Park repeatedly frames his analysis in terms of studies on second-generation immigrants and his own experience. He uses Stuyvesant and Harvard as examples of Asian-American success.

Then he links to a study that says:

...the current study suggests that, contrary to the common perception, tiger parenting is not the most typical parenting profile in Chinese American families,

and...

Compared with the supportive parenting profile, a tiger parenting profile was associated with lower GPA and educational attainment, as well as less of a sense of family obligation; it was also associated with more academic pressure, more depressive symptoms and a greater sense of alienation.

This is incoherent. He's linking to studies that deny his own experience.; 6/22/18, 11:48 AM
Yancey Ward said...: I will await Park's essay 25 years on when he is lamenting his daughter's chosen careers as baristas.; 6/22/18, 12:00 PM
Yancey Ward said...: Like Henry, I found Park's essay hard to follow due to logical incoherence. Perhaps Park really isn't all that bright, but overcame this hurdle with the hard work ethic he picked up somewhere along the line.; 6/22/18, 12:03 PM
clint said...: Reading only what you quoted, there's a strange feel to this.

It's like the author is embarrassed or ashamed of having worked hard.

As if it would give him more pride to have gotten the same answers right because of some magical genius bestowed upon him rather than putting in the work.; 6/22/18, 12:26 PM
Henry said...: Gabriel said... We never say that athletes will be happier and more successful if they are not driven.

Well, occasionally we do, usually when a famous athlete publicly stumbles. For high-achieving athletes like Tiger Woods or Ichiro (has cut off ties to the father that drove him), we frame it in terms of happier or successful. But there other examples, such as tennis star Mary Pierce, where the psychological problems that accompanied the driven lifestyle won out.; 6/22/18, 12:27 PM
mockturtle said...: Yancey Ward observes: Like Henry, I found Park's essay hard to follow due to logical incoherence. Perhaps Park really isn't all that bright, but overcame this hurdle with the hard work ethic he picked up somewhere along the line.

That occurred to me, as well. That and the fact that he is writing for the NYT.; 6/22/18, 12:33 PM
Craig said...: Henry, Yancey Ward, mockturtle: Read the essay again. It's not logically incoherent. The studies don't deny Park's experience. If you guys are seeing incoherence, it's either because you didn't read the essay carefully or because you don't understand what incoherence is.; 6/22/18, 1:09 PM
mockturtle said...: Craig: By incoherence, I mean that Park is saying that his experience resulted in success--more than he probably merited--but that he will spare his children this success because it's not worth it. He goes on to enumerate the instances where Asian students excel above their non-Asian peers.

My own anecdote: My older daughter married the eldest son of a Korean family. He was strict with their son [and also his son by a former relationship who lived with them] but they were doing well in school and staying out of trouble. My grandson, always precocious, was a skilled pilot by the age of 15. Well, my daughter thought my SIL was being too harsh [no physical abuse whatever] a father and divorced him. Predictably, my grandson dropped out of school after a few years, got a DUI and spent most of his time playing video games in his mother's basement. Thankfully, he is now working for his father's luxury car dealership and showing a little maturity at the age of 28. Yes, there are other dynamics besides the cultural ones but overprotective mothers and--especially--lack of fathers at home have done incalculable damage to our young.; 6/22/18, 1:42 PM
Gabriel said...: @Henry: But there other examples, such as tennis star Mary Pierce, where the psychological problems that accompanied the driven lifestyle won out.

I don't think you can find anyone expressing the opinion that athletes in general should not have to put tens of thousands of hours into repetitive practice, sometimes needing to be pushed hard, in order to achieve athletic excellence--instead people say that it was perhaps not right for that particular athlete.

And you DO find people saying the opposite about academic excellence--that if academic excellence requires that then there is something wrong with how we define excellence, and the people who put in that kind of effort are assumed to be doing something wrong.; 6/22/18, 1:42 PM
Gabriel said...: @Craig: The studies don't deny Park's experience.

I would second this. The studies express averages for a population.

If a study proves that men average taller than women, they are not denying that 6'10" Sally is taller than 5'11" Dave.

Park is saying, in a shorthand way, that the studies show that "tiger parenting" all else being equal is worse for students, on the average.

I don't vouch for the truth or falsity of this because I think that academic excellence and athletics excellence have far more in common with each other than people think. I believe that if every kid was forced to practice in that same way and same manner as those who go on to professional athletics are accustomed to practice, their outcomes in general would also average worse.

Because there is no one way to do things that is appropriate for everyone. A kid with the potential to be Michael Jordan would need something different from the kids who don't, if he has any chance to ever actually perform at that level of excellence, and applying those methods to the rest of the kids would frustrate them and burn them out, it would not produce a generation of Michael Jordans.

What it might do is produce more Michael Jordans, catching the kids who had that potential but would, in the absence of that kind of training, got into smoking pot or investment banking or physics. But it's not going to produce that result for anyone who did not have the capability to achieve it, which is the vast majority of people.

Make the appropriate substitutions in what I wrote to see how I think academic excellence works.; 6/22/18, 2:17 PM
Lucien said...: It's interesting to consider the academics vs. athletics comparison in terms of team & individual endeavors. It seems that most kids driven to academic excellence are mostly in isolated, individualized environments with their parents. Ditto a lot of individual sports, athletes (tennis players, golfers, figure skaters), where mom or dad may also be the only coaches they have for more than a decade. Meanwhile, the best soccer, football & basketball players, even with the most hard-driving parents, wind up in team situations where they have a lot of interaction with other kids in the same boat.; 6/22/18, 2:29 PM
Howard said...: To the extent that IQ is likely mostly inherited, the major effect of parenting a child is on the psychological health once they are adults dealing with the stress of their career, lovelife and family. Thus the duty is to make the kid physically and mentally strong without making them neurotic or narcissistic. My guess is tiger parents make more than their fair share of neurotic adults, indulgent parents more narcissistic adults.; 6/22/18, 2:50 PM
Howard said...: Based on their ability, parents must establish tailored minimum academic, athletic, chore, and meaningful hobby performance standards and hold the kids accountable. Daily fun down-time and proper sleep is key to not going overboard.; 6/22/18, 2:56 PM
lgv said...: Asians are so much smarter. Not. This always cracks me up. Go to various Asian countries. Notice that the garbage is picked up by Asians. These are not smart people.

the over representation of Asians in high achievement in America is cultural, but more so the parental style which is not cultural from the old country.; 6/22/18, 3:31 PM
mikee said...: “Baseball is 90% mental, the other half is physical.” – Yogi Berra
Same with all of life.; 6/22/18, 4:48 PM
Henry said...: @Craig -- Park is generalizing. He generalizes from his own experience. He generalizes from Harvard / Stuyvesant admissions data. He generalizes from studies about second generation Asian-Americans. He generalizes from a study about tiger parenting. What is incoherent is not his item-by-item descriptions. It is that put together they don't sum up to anything. He's just saying "this, and this, and this, and this, I conclude this, the end."

The comparison of Asian-American success (Asian-Americans fill the nation’s top universities in staggering numbers...) with the tiger parenting studying (children subjected to high-pressure parenting actually tend to do worse in school) cannot be made sense together as some outcome of averaging. You would have to have a huge cohort of Asian-Americans bottoming out in unusual numbers to create your average.

The obvious answer to this conundrum is that the tiger parenting study simply doesn't map to the second-generation Asian American data which which Park leads his essay. The ideas seem connected, but not in a coherent way.; 6/22/18, 4:55 PM
buwaya said...: "the over representation of Asians in high achievement in America is cultural, but more so the parental style which is not cultural from the old country."

This does not make sense.

Lets ignore "Asians" and just say "Chinese", to be specific. There are a lot of very different "Asians" with different parenting styles.

The Chinese are on top everywhere they go, outside of China proper. They are the academic stars, they are the wealthy and the haut-bourgeois disproportionately, and they most certainly aren't the garbagemen - anymore.

They WERE, once, garbagemen and rickshaw-pullers in Manila and Djakarta and Kuala Lumpur, also indentured plantation laborers and nannies and domestic servants. But this is no longer the case.

They are always on an upward track no matter where they start. This is an interesting phenomenon and requires an explanation.

The "American" Chinese are no different from the overseas Chinese, other than the fact that the US is still getting a flow of poor Chinese from China. In most other places there are immigration restrictions preventing entry of Chinese.

Indians abroad are in most ways quite as successful as the Chinese. Many overseas Indian populations were shipped off to British colonies as indentured plantation labor, much like the Chinese. There are lots of them in Malaysia, Fiji, Trinidad, Uganda (from which they were expelled), South Africa, etc. In all these places they do much as the Chinese, taking over the top spots vs the local populations.; 6/22/18, 5:11 PM
Char Char Binks, Esq. said...: "But here's my question: despite all these first rate musician why have the Asians not produced any well known composers?"

Top-flight classical musicians today, as well as for the past several decades, have vastly disproportionately been either Asian or Jewish. However, most of the best pieces with the best tunes have already been written long ago, back when almost all the greatest composers were white European gentiles. The best a musician of any ethnicity can hope for today is to be a great performer, conductor, or maybe film score arranger.; 6/22/18, 8:25 PM
Char Char Binks, Esq. said...: Most NFL wide receivers train very hard for long hours, but that doesn't mean that training hard for long hours will get just ANYONE to the big league. They train to beat out OTHER gifted athletes, not to beat the run-of-the-mill plodders.

Brain work is similar in that way.; 6/22/18, 8:28 PM
Freeman Hunt said...: I had and have several friends who experienced the same type of parenting as Mr. Park. All of them have chosen a slightly different parenting path similar to him too.; 6/22/18, 8:47 PM
Gabriel said...: @Henry:The comparison of Asian-American success (Asian-Americans fill the nation’s top universities in staggering numbers...) with the tiger parenting studying (children subjected to high-pressure parenting actually tend to do worse in school) cannot be made sense together as some outcome of averaging. You would have to have a huge cohort of Asian-Americans bottoming out in unusual numbers to create your average

I saw you palm that card. You started talking about Asians only, then you switched to children, and then you switched back to Asians only.

That's why your averages don't come out.

Here's the missing pieces:

The top universities disproportionately draw from top academic excellence. Asians are disproportionately represented in top academic excellence--however it is they get that way, tiger parenting or not, that is where they are. You are talking about a fraction of a fraction of a minority.

The giant state universities where the vast majority of Americans go? That's where your "bottoming out" Asians are, where they're not quite so noticeable. Even there they are overrepresented relative to their share of the general population.

The least selective schools have hardly any Asians at all.; 6/23/18, 11:50 AM
Zach said...: The article isn't logically incoherent. It's emotionally divided. He attributes some of his success to the idea that he wasn't allowed to fail, but doesn't like the cost and doesn't want to replicate his upbringing with his own children.

Regarding athletics, has anyone read Andre Agassi's Open? He had an extremely aggressive sports dad and was basically forced to be a tennis prodigy whether he wanted to or not (he didn't). So he was fabulously successful in a sport that he hated and never would have chosen for himself.; 6/23/18, 1:40 PM