RoR: Forum

Something that just occured to me, could we reasonably expect anyone on RoR to come forward and say:

"Hi my name is (insert name here). I am a complete loser. I am not successful in anyway. I am unemployed and or living in my parent's basement. I have no skills to speak of. I do enjoy playing World of Warcraft at minimum 13 hours a day. I attribute all of this to my parent who raised me in a (insert parenting style here) environment"
(John Armaos)

LMAO!!

Okay, really I have no time to spare, but I had to respond! Sanction!

Truth is, John...No...no one is going to say that. But think of some of the posters here (particularly in the past) who were just miserable SOBs when they posted, and read between the lines....ask yourself, "Would I want my kid to be THAT guy when he grows up?" And then pay attention when they post their opinions on child-rearing on a thread like this one....and connect the dots....

(For the record, I consider myself to be much less sucessful than my son...in a great many areas. The only bragging I do is about him...because I know I finally did something right... :-)

Post 141

Thursday, January 20, 2011 - 3:39pm

Well, different people have different expectations.
I dare say that Amy Chua's daughters would have been considered a failure if they only attend UIC!

Post 142

Thursday, January 20, 2011 - 5:17pm

That's probably true Hong but isn't that measuring success by status rather than success by attaining a eudaemonic (i.e. fulfilling and enriching life) existence? I don't mean to say there's no value in attaining admittance into a prestigious school, but if the only reason you want your child to get into that school is because it is prestigious, where is the value in that? How is that different than wanting a designer purse, not because it is a purse that would suit your needs, but because it has a designer label and it is popularly perceived as the best?

I can't help but think of Bill Gates. The man dropped out of college, and I can't imagine someone like Bill Gates who invented Microsoft Windows having grown up with Chua's style of parenting.

Post 143

Thursday, January 20, 2011 - 5:25pm

Hong:

I dare say that Amy Chua's daughters would have been considered a failure if they only attend UIC!

That is a very sad comment.

Sam

Post 144

Thursday, January 20, 2011 - 5:33pm

My wife and I have been discussing this for a while now. She finally admitted something telling about the Chinese mindset when raising kids. My wife is Chinese by the way. She would prefer our kids to be wealthy CEO's rather than college professors. I gave her this choice due to the similar status each enjoy since she said she wants our kids to be capable of attaining such status. In the end she would prefer a CEO because the priority is truly on money, not simply status.

Post 145

Thursday, January 20, 2011 - 7:47pm

Erica,

It's great to hear how well Jake is doing.

Ed

Post 146

Thursday, January 20, 2011 - 7:55pm

Luke asks:
"Please share with us how a child raised your way will have a better life than a child raised her way".

I ask:
Which is a better life: a life of contentment and ease in a blissful ignorance? Or a life full of toil and struggle, always in an urge to achieve more?

Post 147

Thursday, January 20, 2011 - 8:01pm

John,

Post 139 was hilarious!

:-)

Ed

Post 148

Thursday, January 20, 2011 - 8:17pm

Hi Luke T.,

she would prefer a CEO because the priority is truly on money, not simply status.

I think this may have something to do with immigrant parents that experienced a lot of poverty. This was definitely the case with both my parents, they definitely wanted me to make a ton of money. I can understand the desire, the kind of poverty my parents experienced was unimaginable. I recall some of those stories my dad told me (he grew up in WW2 Greece) and the poverty he dealt with sounded traumatic. I can understand that extreme reaction to want to earn a lot of money to never have to experience something so horrible as that kind of abject poverty. One family member suffered a burn from scalding hot water, got an infection and died. My father fell off a cliff and went into a coma for four days, no hospital. Their house collapsed from an earthquake, no such thing as insurance. My mother didn't fare much better, one dress only, a house with one large room that the entire family slept in. Food they ate that they can only grow from the family's meager farm, not surprisingly they were constantly hungry. Throw a war on top of that.

Doesn't sound like much fun.

When people talk about Americans living below the poverty line, I find it hilarious. As long as we have fat poor people, no one should have the gall to call that poverty.

(Edited by John Armaos on 1/20, 9:15pm)

Post 149

Friday, January 21, 2011 - 12:01am

Hong wrote,

I ask: Which is a better life: a life of contentment and ease in a blissful ignorance? Or a life full of toil and struggle, always in an urge to achieve more?

Better by what standard? The person's own happiness or some external standard of success and achievement? Obviously, blissful ignorance is not desirable, but a life full of toil and struggle may not be either, unless by "toil and struggle" you simply mean a productive and challenging career. Pursuing a career that one finds exciting and challenging could certainly lead one to try to achieve more, not at the expense of one's happiness or knowledge but in service to it. However, in order to find a productive goal that one truly enjoys, one should be free to explore different alternatives and to make the choice oneself, not have it chosen by one's parents because it satisfies their desire for status and prestige.

Not every child can be expected to go to college and become an academic scholar who earns straight A's in every subject. For one thing, this is logically impossible, so it cannot be considered a reasonable goal for every student. For another, a child may be much happier attending a trade school and pursuing a career as (say) a mechanic, electrician, chef, hair stylist, secretary, etc. Why should he or she be tracked towards college and expected to get a university degree, if he's not interested in doing so? All this does is conform to some external, artificial standard of "success" that is not connected to the child's own happiness, the satisfaction of which, after all, is the purpose of his life.

It is far too common in our society for parents to think that they can dictate their child's interests and choice of career. If anything needs to be changed or reformed, it is that attitude, which the "Chinese Mother" syndrome simply takes to its logical extreme. The proper goal for a parent is to guide the child towards the kind of job or career that he or she would find most interesting and enjoyable, not towards one that parent would like to see the child pursue. Children are not vehicles through which parents can live vicariously, but are ends in themselves and should be respected as such.

Post 150

Friday, January 21, 2011 - 4:33am

John observed:

As long as we have fat poor people, no one should have the gall to call that poverty.

Amen, brother!

Hong asked:

Which is a better life: a life of contentment and ease in a blissful ignorance? Or a life full of toil and struggle, always in an urge to achieve more?

Bill already echoed my own thoughts in his Post 149 of this thread, but I just want to add that I practice the third alternative, namely:

I happily achieve more with contentment and ease in a blissful knowledge.

When I was a freshman in high school, I envisioned myself attending an "elite" university like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I chose to apply to the "elite" new high school, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM), as a stepping stone to that larger goal. What I learned almost immediately upon entry into NCSSM is that the whole facade of "elitism" amounts to academic snobbery and a workload far exceeding the tangible benefits one can enjoy at the end of the day. (It also provides a way to employ otherwise unemployable social science instructors!) My experience at NCSSM wiped away any delusions of grandeur I might have had regarding "elite" schools. Disillusionment replacement delusion.

Happily, I found that I needed no "elitism" to get what I wanted, namely a job as an engineer at NASA. In fact, just the opposite held true. The state university I attended, North Carolina State University (NCSU), had an excellent cooperative education program. This got my foot in the door at NASA as a college sophomore. By contrast, MIT has no such program though it does have summer internships. But you have to ask yourself: Given the huge extra costs of these "elite" schools, the snobbery, and other roadblocks that add no value to the end result, why even go?

I recommend the Dr. Seuss story "The Sneetches" for a fine metaphor about baseless elitism and snobbery.

I also recommend my review of Your Guide to Slide: The Slacker's Guide to College by Brady Lessard in the archives of this site.

The good life does not have to be a struggle if you do not make it that way. As Bill implied, "work is play" when you make money doing what you enjoy. The hard part is trying enough different possibilities to find that happy optimum.

(Edited by Luke Setzer on 1/21, 4:53am)

Post 151

Friday, January 21, 2011 - 5:22am

John, your argument may well be true, however my wife did not grow up in poverty. Not by Chinese standards anyway. I think her attitude represents a general trend in modern Chinese culture to value positions at large multinationals. She worked at FedEx Shanghai for 5 yrs going from secretary to accountant. Came to the US for an MBA and wants to move to a large metropolis. She hates the burbs where we live, can't wait to move to NY or back to SH. She grew up above average and wants to perform better for our son. The fact that we are already better off than either of our parents is not enough though, since neither of us is a CEO or even a Managing director (her minimum requirement for a spouse before falling for me haha).

Post 152

Friday, January 21, 2011 - 9:35am

Well, different people have different expectations.
I dare say that Amy Chua's daughters would have been considered a failure if they only attend UIC! (Hong Zhang)

�
I don't doubt that for one minute, Hong. In fact, I can't imagine any part of my son's existence that wouldn't be considered a "failure" by Ms. Chua!

Of course, if my son were a morally bankrupt, unethical cad who cheated his way through high school in order to gain admission to Harvard, would Ms. Chua applaud this? He's going to Harvard, after all! What else matters?

Instead, he's one of the most decent, hard-working, industrious young men one could hope to meet.
Still can't play violin, though.

I ask:
Which is a better life: a life of contentment and ease in a blissful ignorance? Or a life full of toil and struggle, always in an urge to achieve more? (Hong Zhang)

Better by what standard? The person's own happiness or some external standard of success and achievement? (Bill Dwyer)

I happily achieve more with contentment and ease in a blissful knowledge. (Luke Setzer)

I've never been sure at all why a "life of contentment" would necessarily include "blissful ignorance", or why people can't be content with the state of being ambitious, and driven to succeed. Thank you, Luke, and Bill, for explaining how this works to those who would claim it is an "either-or" proposition.

Hong, does your question mean that the Chua girls are necessarily destined to never find any contentment in their lives? Now that would be a truly sad statement, and I for one, hope it's not true.

Post 153

Friday, January 21, 2011 - 9:50am

I found an interesting book review that offers this relevant passage regarding so-called "elite" schools:

He also discusses the growing popularity of for-profit, online-driven colleges, which candidly refer to students as "consumers"--an approach that has caught on outside the for-profit sphere. While many institutions must compete with the for-profits by emulating their "jobs, jobs, jobs" credo, those that cannot fit this mold compete by marketing themselves as vehicles for prestige. Prestige is almost exclusively measured by rankings in the all-powerful U.S. News & World Report, and the most important component is selectiveness. Thus, colleges must accept an ever-shrinking portion of their applicant pools, rendering them increasingly elite and exclusive. Public universities, caught between the "jobs" model and the "prestige" model, have had to rely even more upon the productivity of their faculty to prove their worth, squeezing them even harder.

Amy Chua needs to check her premises!

Does the cited magazine warrant that much respect in terms of selecting colleges for a child's future education?

Post 154

Friday, January 21, 2011 - 10:15am

Luke T, I can't understand that mindset at all then. I thought there was some similarity in parental cultures here but now I don't see it (between Chinese and Greek). For one in the Greek immigrant culture a lot of them want to run their own business, working for a multinational corporation not so much. And my parent's motivation in their parenting style I believe in my case was primarily driven by a fear of poverty. So much so that my father hated the idea of me taking up an instrument because he didn't think it was something that could ever make me money. I don't hold any grudges though, since I understand my parents' history their reactions seemed like a logical conclusion to the horrendous poverty they experienced. But in your wife's case, I just don't get it.

Post 155

Friday, January 21, 2011 - 10:25am

Bill I was actually thinking the exact same thing when you said;

Not every child can be expected to go to college and become an academic scholar who earns straight A's in every subject. For one thing, this is logically impossible, so it cannot be considered a reasonable goal for every student. For another, a child may be much happier attending a trade school and pursuing a career as (say) a mechanic, electrician, chef, hair stylist, secretary, etc.

It's probably the case that many high school students should consider taking up a trade rather than going to college. I think we have a glutton of college grads with majors that are not marketable, and instead are making less money than someone like a plumber or electrician would, which from what I had read is in short supply in the market. Because of the overzealous prestige placed on going to college we have too many kids going to traditional 4-year colleges wasting their parents' money on degrees that don't end up being worth the money spent on them.

(Edited by John Armaos on 1/21, 10:26am)

Post 156

Friday, January 21, 2011 - 11:17am

Hey Erica,

Welcome back to RoR!

Nice to see your posting again, and it's good to hear how well your son is doing! It sounds like he's enjoying himself! :-)

Post 157

Saturday, January 22, 2011 - 8:18am

There was an interesting segment of PBS Newshour last night on education in S. Korea. They've been doing a series on life in S. Korea and last night they talked about the emphasis on education. Here's a link to the transcript. It's amazing how much additional, out of school training the students' families pay for. The average family spends more than 10% of its income on what they call "cram schools", which is more per capita than any other country.

It seems to be paying off; Korean students outperform most of the rest of the world. However, they also have the highest suicide rate of all the industrialized countries. When asked if it was important to get into a good college (80% of S. Korean high school students go to college), one student said: "If I go to a bad university, I can be ignored by other people."

Because of this and other aspects of the pressure students experience, they're beginning to reevaluate their system. As one official put it:

We need to rethink our views on success. It is now time for South Korean society to allow diversity about what is successful. Being happy is also success.

That should sound familiar, as will some of the other points made.

Thanks,
Glenn

Post 158

Saturday, January 22, 2011 - 9:05am

Erica,

I like your posts, You caught the traps in my question immediately.

However, I want to make a distinction: although Amy Chua would have considered *her daughters* a failure if they only went to UIC, she would not consider *your son* a failure for doing the same. This is important.

BTW, I just got some devastating comments from my son's teacher something along the line "he is such a bright young man and capable of a great deal and it would be heartening to see him aspire to a higher level of performance...." I am going to give that lazy, stupid little imbecile a good whip now... (yes, I am a Dragon Mother after all!).

Post 159

Saturday, January 22, 2011 - 11:54am