Almost exactly a century ago, two Harvard professors””Dr. Boris Sidis, in psychology, and Dr. Leo Wiener, in the Slavic literature department””riled America by showcasing their two prodigy sons and the methods that had produced them, both Harvard-ready math marvels. While 11-year-old William James (Billy) Sidis stunned the university’s Mathematical Club with a lecture on the fourth dimension and 15-year-old Norbert Wiener plunged into graduate studies, Dr. Sidis insisted that anyone could nurture such youthful prowess. The only obstacle, he argued, was the American embrace of mediocrity. “Poor old college owls, academic barn-yard-fowls and worn-out sickly school-bats,” he scolded in his 1911 book Philistine and Genius, “you are panic-stricken by the power of sunlight, you are in agonizing, in mortal terror of critical, reflective thought, you dread and suppress the genius of the young.”
Now it’s Yale’s turn. In a book with a title very much in the pugnacious Sidis spirit, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua, a professor at the university’s law school, sets out to provoke with her account of raising two precociously talented daughters. Chua, now making the TV rounds, is well aware her methods will make her readers gasp””with horror but also with unexpected envy.
Well, it works until/unless it doesn’t. This is the approach taken by Andre Agassi’s father with his three kids. He got one son who was a 2nd rate tennis player, one daughter who ran away from home at age 16 to live with the 5-times married Pancho Gonzales (who her father had hired to coach her) and then he got Andre Agassi who became a worldclass player (who hated him and wrote a tell-all autobiography.)
The thing is — I know quite a number of people who have nationally ranked dogs and horses in a number of venues. The most important thing these folks do is find the right dog or horse. They might go through 10 or more to get the one they’re going to be able to make into a top champion. To assume that the two kids you happen to give birth to are going to be the ones you can mold into Nobel Laureates or world famous violinists is just wishful thinking. It’s not even clear that what you’re doing is going to produce them, in any event. You are, however, guaranteed to have two kids who hate your guys when they grow up.
I wonder what view the girls’ father took? He doesn’t seem to get a mention at all.
That is a very valuable perspective, #1, which hadn’t really occurred to me although I find much troubling with the approach to child-rearing that Chua advocates.
Does Chua ever mention that in the USA she has had the [b]liberty[/b] to not only have TWO children, while also pursuing her own career path, but also to raise her children as she sees fit? And in Australia I have seen for 20 years precisely the same expectations by both naturalized and overseas Chinese parents and their out-working. Not for nothing are the Chinese known as the ‘Jews of the Orient’! At our denominational, top private boys’ school (and several others) these parents form a sub-culture, permitted if not entirely welcomed, because they can afford the fees and their sons’ accomplishments will give the school a good name and cache, and eventually also maybe some loyal alumni. And I liked many of the boys, from whom came almost the whole badminton team our son played on. However, when our son showed equal academic promise and the psych test scores to prove it, and began to be treated rather like the horses and dogs that #1 mentioned by his teachers, all the results were not as hoped. Eventually 5 years later he has chosen to have some evaluation, which has showed there are aspects of functioning that he struggles with due to brain blood flow patterns and some slightly anomalous brain structure (put down to 12 weeks’ prematurity, for now). So I thank God we didn’t push him any harder than we did and that he has applied his high intelligence to learning about his particular neurophysiology, which he can now work with to achieve what he is capable of – what God saved him and gave him the gift of life on earth to do.
I am only bothered by the immodest projection of her own values and achievements by Chua onto the rest of Americans. Fine for her and others like her to pursue these goals, which she has the [b]liberty[/b] to do in the US, but her underlying assumption that others could and should achieve similarly if they just worked harder for it is a badly flawed assumption. Not even all Chinese will be equipped to perform this way, as #1 points out.
I know a number of Chinese children brought up under this regimen. There is a strong social Darwinism at work here that, for the winners, is very productive. But for those who don’t come out on the very top, life continues at a less painful pace as they adjust to working in a world where being Number one isn’t possible. The structure of the family remains intact and their place in it remains established. This family safety net evaporated with the one child family. Now one finds children spoiled beyond our sense of spoiled and increasingly tainted by the worst of American values. But for those who are at the top, success and money come easily. They KNOW what work means, what focus and concentration mean and the price at which they are bought.
The author overstates her case. She is obviously a bitch on wheels. Nevertheless, her point is well taken about the effect of our patty-cake approach to child rearing. It is worth remarking that it is an old saying, that he who takes a Chinese wife has a tiger by the ears.
And #3, you would be surprised how well this system – but not so overwrought – works. It is an OLD system, many centuries old, starting with the endless rote memorization in elementary school through to the Chin-Shih of the old bureaucracy. It produces prodigies of skill – see Chinese Olympic divers and researchers and countless MIT students. Larry
Well, if it’s not so overwrought then it’s not quite the same system, is it, #4? I think the point of Chua’s ‘evangelism’ [i]is[/i] the overwrought-ness, for which she seems to find justification at every turn. At any rate, the old system based on something like Confucianism on steroids, is the one that for more than 400 years has been evangelized by western Christian efforts, first European Catholics and later mainly American Protestants, with some positive developments. That is how they came to know the canon of Western classical piano music they now play so well, isn’t it? Far better that than Confucianist-inspired child-rearing methods foisted on Americans, I suggest.
BTW, I think the photo of Chua portrays her as a sort of knock-off of Michelle Malkin.
“Hate your guts” (not “guys”) was what I was trying to say. 🙂 BTW, my feeling is that on the most important things you can do to make your kid “excellent” at anything is for him/her to observe the amount of effort that YOU put into something similar. Just how long does this woman practice the violin herself everyday? Oh..I thought so. And it won’t take her kids long to figure it out either. “Gee mom…you’re too lazy to be a prodigy. You just have enough energy to try to force US to be prodigies.” I don’t expect my kids to work harder than I do. But I DO expect my kids to work as hard as I do.
[blockquote”I’m sure it’s all about you anyway,” Lulu says. As they hunker down to criticize, and make her revise, revise, revise, Sophia, now 17, issues a warning well worth keeping in mind if, or when, the mommy wars erupt over Chua’s provocative portrait. “It’s not possible for you to tell the complete truth,” Sophia tells her mother. “You’ve left out so many facts. But that means no one can really understand.”[/blockquote]
The mother’s pathology here is pretty clear. She’s a narcissist, the star of her own show, and her children are simply supporting characters. If this is what’s going on to get people into college these days (Ivy League or otherwise), it’s no wonder 1 in 5 college students has a personality disorder. It’s inherited.
Larry,
Of course the SYSTEM produces prodigies. Just as I said, if you can go through 100 warmbloods you are going to find that one unbelievable horse who MIGHT be an olympic dressage horse. Click [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKQgTiqhPbw] here [/url]to see one of the greats performing.
What you CAN’T do is take the foal of your favorite mare and train the bejesus out of it and expect to get the same results.
Interesting in this article that the great violin prodigy daughter gave up the violin but is now a really good tennis player. Whoopee do. I live in the epicenter of rich people playing tennis. We have a LOT of good tennis players. I used to date a kid who was a ranked junior. He didn’t even end up making a career of it — not good enough. One of my friend’s daughters studied at Nick Bollettieri’s tennis school in Florida. She ended up getting a scholarship to a very minor school. MILLIONS of dollars going into all these tennis wannabees with about the same chance of producing a national ranking as winning the lottery. So this woman is an unapologetic pushy tennis mom. Big deal. The streets are lined with them here. Oh yeah — I forgot. The Menendez family used to live here too. Killed their millionaire parents for, among other things, the money to pursue a professional tennis career. Career fizzled. They did testify in their trial that their dad tried to make them top swimmers by, among other things, stepping on their hands when they tried to get out of the pool. One of them told his psychiatrist that one of his first thoughts when he believed he had pulled off the perfect murder (he hadn’t) was “Dad would be really proud of me.” Mom and Dad are buried here.
As far as the Chinese divers — my kids used to swim competitively and now they dive competitively. We are also the epicenter of rich people whose kids swim and dive competitively. (Unlike me, they can actually afford it.) We have no less than 5 private elite teams that practice within 1/2 hour of here. They are all run by Chinese ex-olympians. By 10 or 11 years old the kids are expected to practice a miniumum of 3-4 hours a day 5-6 days a week. Once in awhile one ends up with a national ranking. But it’s insane. There are hundreds of kids doing this racking up thousands and thousands of hours (and a lot more thousands of dollars) and MAYBE one will attain SOME ranking. Now, if you replicate this in China with like 1,0000,000 or more kids you will get some top swimmers. And if you give them steroids (like the Chinese used to do) they’ll probably even win.
My kids did not want to do the 5 times a week thing so they switched to diving. The Chinese have not taken over diving here like they have swimming. They dive three days a week for 2.5 hours. Not enough for them to ever make it to the top, but they love it. There’s maybe one kid on the team right now that might get a scholarship to a big school because of his diving but it’s not them. And I’m not going to ruin it for them by fooling myself that it’s ever going to be.
“What you CAN’T do is take the foal of your favorite mare and train the bejesus out of it and expect to get the same results.”
Please – Not good language on a Christian site.
Sorry, it’s an Irish expression. I thought it had gotten far enough from it’s original usage to be accepable (as is similarly distanced “darn” “heck” “shoot.” etc. Webster’s dictionary gives it as a “mild oath” with “deuce” or “dickens” given as synonyms. In any event, it’s an expression I’ve heard all my life without thinking about it. I’ll think about it more in the future. 🙂
The mother’s behavior is not pathological. In China, it is commonplace enough, as is the father’s dominance and Elder Brother’s perks. She doesn’t have to play the violin to “model” for the child. Why should she? This is the last thing a Chinese kid would expect. You do not grasp clearly the degree to which “respect for your elders” still permeates Chinese old-style society, and even in new style society, the old rules obtain. If I went to China now to see my son and we went to a Chinese family meal, I would sit at the head of the table and be served first unless there was another man there older than I.
As opposed to the author’s means, the Chinese, when they want REAL superiority, test elementary school kids nationwide, and the REALLY promising are taken from the home and sent to special school where, say, diving and gymnastics is all they do. This is what has made Wuhan Mountain so famous (for centuries) because of their incessant training. So. #10, they DO take the foal from the dam and if you watch the Chinese in the Olympics, You can see the effects. It may not be the only system that works, but it DOES work. Larry
Aside from the small matter of the human and emotional cost, Larry. Just because you’re Chinese, doesn’t mean you’re free from those inconveniences.
I ended up following in my father’s footsteps and even achieving his scholarly commendation (not that I come close to replicating his abilities), but it came from personal inclination (and perhaps a desire, in some small way, to emulate) and in no way from parental pressure.
“What you CAN’T do is take the foal of your favorite mare and train the bejesus out of it and expect to get the same results.”
Actually you can. Read Malcolm Gladwell’s _Outliers_. He examines folks from Agassi to Bill Gates and looks at the factors that made them what they are. The bottom line was that all of them were given the opportunity to put in enormous amounts of intense time into their career at a very early age. About 10,000 hours.
Gladwell calls the 10,000-Hour Rule. Studies suggest that the key to success in any field has nothing to do with talent. It’s simply practice, 10,000 hours of it — 20 hours a week for 10 years. This includes table tennis, gymnastics, computer programming, violin and the like. 10,000 hours. 20 hours a week for 10 years. (Or 60-70 hours a week for 3 (the usual medical residency).
I buy it. It took approximately 10,000 hours of intensive intervention to bring my kid’s IQ up from 68 to 100, and to make her a fluent reader. I wouldn’t have forced her to put in that kind of work in order to play the violin (who cares?) or tennis (?wtf) but reading is critical. Being cognitively able in today’s society is critical.
Somethings are worth putting in the work for. Americans aren’t used to that concept, but Asians are, and I am Asian. I am glad we didn’t go the accomodations/medications/self esteem route, and she is too.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1858880,00.html#ixzz1ApbkD8eb
Larry and Clueless, you’re not following what I’m saying. I said OF COURSE the SYSTEM produces prodigies. And it does it in exactly the way you describe. 1,000,000 kids get tested, the most promising get picked, then they (may be) removed from their families and are subjected to relentless training. This produces olympic champions, chess champions, and everything else. This is exactly how the soviets did it as well.
The foal comment meant this — you don’t just wander out to the barn and see your good old favorite mare in foal and take THAT FOAL and expect it’s going to be in the olympics. It might, but the chances are slim to none. Just as if you take YOUR OWN two kids, like this mother did, and subject them to relentless pressure and training, your chances of producing a violin prodigy or olympic champion are still slim to none. Because the chances are only a million to one to begin with. But if you have 6 billion people, you’re going to be able to identify those promising million to one kids very early and THEN relentlessly train them to be prodigies.
But yes, Clueless, I do believe that by intensive training you can make almost any kid reasonably competent in almost anything. And certainly school is one of those things. Nobody believes in training more than I do — I’m a professional trainer. I taught my kids to read (fluently) in kindergarten when I figured out the school wasn’t going to do it. I expect my kids to get A’s in all their school subjects unless there is some particular reason why they can’t (and I haven’t found one yet.) And this is done by hard work and training. But the most important thing I do for my kids is role model the level of work I expect them to engage in. If a tennis mom is sitting in the shade on her rear end fanning herself and drinking ice tea and yelling out “run faster, hit it harder, jump higher” the day is going to come when they turn to her and say “why don’t you get out here and do it?” If they don’t say it, they’re going to think it.
That said, there is an absolute limit to all training in any particular field for any particular kid. I do NOT believe that if you push hard work and training to the level of abuse you can take an ordinary kid and make them a prodigy. Because to create a truly exceptional athlete or musician you need three things: 1) extraordinary talent (not everybody has it) 2) extreme level of desire (just because mom has it doesn’t mean the kid has it) and 3) top training/coaching combined with intensive practice. Mom can provide/demand the third item, but she can’t do squat about #1 and #2 even though she thinks she can.
“That said, there is an absolute limit to all training in any particular field for any particular kid. I do NOT believe that if you push hard work and training to the level of abuse you can take an ordinary kid and make them a prodigy.”
There is a limit. What represents “abuse” will depend on the child. Eventually, once ordinary mastery of essential subjects (the three Rs come to mind) has been achieved, the child will need to want whatever is being mastered in order to achieve prodigy. I think most people could be prodigies if they wanted it and if they had the opportunity. Most people in the world simply don’t have the opportunity. We are fortunate in the US that there are so many second chances and opportunities available to us. That wouldn’t be the case in, say, Asia. Further, many who do have the opportunity don’t want it badly enough to put in the work. When I was in college and the first two years of medical school (I completed both college/med school in six years), I loved fencing, however while my parents were generous, they stretched to put me through medical school. There was no money left over for fencing lessons and I did not ask for lessons. Instead, I did footwork exercises at 6am by myself every morning for an hour in the student lounge, went to morning classes in Chicago, then left at noon to take the subway to Evanston to fence with the team. Came back at 5. Did make up classes between 7-9, studied until midnight, then ran track before hitting the sack. I studied on the subway, and every meal I ate was with book in hand the years I was fencing for the team. I was good enough to be my college team captain and to make NCAAs, but not good enough to make Nationals. A car and a coach, or fencing camp would probably have gotten me there. My (younger) daughter (now 13) also likes fencing. We have been working out together 3days a week for the past few months, and she takes a lesson twice a week from a really great coach. However while she likes it, she really doesn’t want to put in the work to be olympic material. She’ll probably be a decent college fencer like I was, but without the effort. She will not be an Olympian, but it will not be for lack of opportunity. It will be due to motivation. That’s okay. It’s just a game, and we have fun together.
I do agree with Chua and Gladwell that talent is overrated. Gladwell describes how the world’s best table tennis player was found to have slower reflexes than average. He was less talented, not more talented than his opponents. However he did work vastly harder than everybody else.
I also feel that success builds on itself. As Gladwell points out in his analysis of Canadian hockey, the defining factor is having a late birth day. If you have a late birthday, you will be bigger, stronger and more coordinated than those with an early birthday. That early advantage (which has nothing to do with talent) means that coaches will smile at you more, push you harder and you will play more on the team. The harder you work, the better you play. The better you play the more opportunities you get to play. Success is self feeding. (So is failure).
Most people (adults and children) who are very good at something say that they “love it” and work hard because they “love it”. However nobody loves what they are really rotten at. One needs to have a measure of success in order to enjoy something, and once one has that, one feels enjoyment, and further people smile at you and treat you differently which adds to your enjoyment.
Children by definition do not know what they might “love” once they got really good at it. Before anybody can learn to “love” reading, there is the difficult matter of memorizing “‘A’ says “Ah, Aye, or Ahh” or “‘B’ says ‘Buh'”. That nasty in between state can take a few days for the immediately talented and over a year for those with severe delays. Few children, left to their own devices, as Chua points out will put in the effort to find out what they might “love” if only they were good at it.
That is why children are given parents.
I am an extreme believer that success builds on itself. That’s why I think it’s important for kids to excel in SOMETHING (model car building, anything) so that they see that they can do it. You take a kid to watch diving. He sees somebody get up on the 3 meter board perform a difficult back dive. You ask the kid “could you do that?” Kid says “never in a million years.” Two years of training later, the kid can do it. Lesson: impossible things can be done if you break them down into pieces and work at them.
That said, talent and desire are still big ones. Clueless, your story about desire is an excellent one. But talent is important too — it’s just that in some activities lack of talent can be more easily overcome with desire and training than in others. I think table tennis is probably one.
When I was a kid I was an Irish dancer. This is a fiercely competitive sport. I was pretty good. My sister was a top champion. In our dance school (and every other one) the top champions were treated with extreme pleasantness by their teachers, the middle dancers (me) were treated reasonably nicely, and the bad dancers were either ignored (if lucky) or actually abused. There were two sisters in my class — one was tall and thin and very good and one was short and fat and as good as you can be if you are short and fat which is not very because this is a sport that requires very high elevation,which you can’t get when you’re fat. One day the teacher was screaming at the fat sister to get up higher. Girl says that she’s trying her best. Teacher replies “maybe you’d get up higher if you weren’t so fat.” (Bear in mind she’s talking to a 10 year old.) Old sister (12 years old — and I remember this because I’ve never seen anybody show so much courage again in my life) says to the teacher “you can’t talk to my sister like that” and takes her sister’s hand and they walk out. They later switched to another teacher.
Great story, except for the postscript. Twenty-five or so years later I go to an Irish dance exhibition being put on in a local church for St. Patrick’s Day. (I just happened to see it in the paper.) I sit down and who do I see sitting some distance from me but the “fat girl” of my former dance school. She apparently has twin kids, about 10-11 years old and they’re both dancers. They get up and do a duet together. Boy is fabulous but girl is only so-so and further makes two or three errors. Said errors could only be detected by an Irish dancer, hence virtually no one in the audience even notices. Girl goes back and sits next to her mother. Mother leans over and whispers urgently in girl’s ear for a good minute or more. Girl breaks into tears and covers her face with her hands. I had been thinking of going over and introducing myself after the performance to see if she remembered me, but after this I decided not to. But the lesson is this — you can make your daugher cry all you want, but you can’t abuse her into being a top dancer. Too bad this woman didn’t learn it when she was young.
http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/01/13/the-tiger-mother-responds-to-readers/
Amy Chau responds to critics in this blog interview. She appears to be much less driven than on first glance.
Exerpt:
Interviewer: “Your method may work with children with a native high IQ—but demanding that kind of excellence from less intelligent children seems unfair and a fool’s errand. Demanding hard work and a great effort from children is the best middle ground we can reach philosophically, isn’t it? Your thoughts?”
Chau: “Jokes about A+s and gold medals aside (much of my book is tongue-in-cheek, making fun of myself), I don’t believe that grades or achievement is ultimately what Chinese parenting (at least as I practice it) is really about. I think it’s about helping your children be the best they can be—which is usually better than they think! It’s about believing in your child more than anyone else—even more than they believe in themselves. And this principle can be applied to any child, of any level of ability. My youngest sister, Cindy, has Down syndrome, and I remember my mother spending hours and hours with her, teaching her to tie her shoelaces on her own, drilling multiplication tables with Cindy, practicing piano every day with her. No one expected Cindy to get a PhD! But my mom wanted her to be the best she could be, within her limits. Today, my sister works at Wal-Mart, has a boyfriend and still plays piano—one of her favorite things is performing for her friends. She and my mom have a wonderful relationship, and we all love her for who she is.”
I can go along with that.