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What influence do parents have on child development
My understanding of the difference between Chinese and Western parenting
The differences between American and Chinese parenting
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Asian Parenting isn 't for Everybody
Stereo typical Asian parenting methods are tantamount to child abuse. Although Amy Chua, in her essay “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” believes her way of teaching is the right way, Janice Mirikitani in her poem “Suicide Note” proves us otherwise. Being a parent is not an easy task but there is a right way and a wrong way to raise your children. Kids should have the right to join a sport or play to express themselves freely and discover they 're interests. A mother should never scold her child by telling them they are "garbage". The outcome could end up being a teenager committing suicide, just as in Mirikitani 's poem.
In addition, to discover your likes and dislikes, getting involved in activities plays
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From her point of view, she describes to us that what she did was not wrong. Her excuse was that her daughter was being disrespectful towards her. If Chua 's daughter had taken it serious and had she been very offended, she could have taken the drastic decision to commit suicide just as in Mirikitani 's story. Teenager 's tend to believe it is very important to look good, for them to have self-esteem. Mirikitani 's poem “not good enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough” (Mirikitani 3) shows how depressed the victim was. The worst part to me is she even apologized for not being what they expected her to be, “If only I were a son, shoulders broad as the sunset threading through pine, I would see the light in my mother’s eyes, or the golden pride reflected in my father’s dream of my wide, male hands worthy of work and comfort”. (Mirikitani 10-16) for not having came out a male. If you are such a bad parent, to the point that you make your own children believe you don’t love them, you do not deserve
Like the name of this article suggests, the writer's main purpose is to persuade the audience to make them believe that Chinese mothers are indeed superior. To support her argument she uses different methods to appeal to her audience's favor: she uses statistics of researches about Chinese mothers and Western mothers opinions, opinions that are mostly about how parents should or should not do when they are raising their children. She also uses passages of her life as a Chinese mother to support her argument. Also, she points out a few characteristics of western parents that are completely opposite to how a Chinese mother raises their children, which made her argument stronger. Nevertheless, there were some fallacies in her logic. One of her main fallacies is what we call "Hasty Generalization".
Amy Chua utilizes evidence to verify that Western parenting practice is wrong and not as effective as Chinese parenting practice. In her article, Chua comments, “Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable-even legally actionable-to Westerners, “Hey fatty-lose some weight.” By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue” (Chua 54). She also gives her observation as evidence to convince Westerners treat their kid wrongly. She adds her observation in her article “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” “I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her “beautiful and incredibly competent.” She later told me that made her feel like garbage” (Chua 54). Brooks, in opposite, does not fight against to prove Chinese parenting techniques are completely wrong. However, he just want to give evidence so that Chua and Chinese, in common, understand Western parenting practices are good in some ways. In Brooks’ article, he clears, “So I’m not against the way Chua pushes her daughters” (Brooks 59). Furthermore, David Brooks writes in his article “I wish she recognized that in some important ways the school cafeteria is more intellectually demanding than the library” (Brooks
Parenting styles have been widely defined by Baumrind into three categories, authoritative, authoritarian and permissive. Parenting styles can be defined as a pattern of attitudes in how parents choose to express and communicate with their children. These styles are categorized based on the level of nurturance, parental control and level of responsiveness (Dwairy, 2004). Authoritative style exhibits high levels of demand, responsiveness and nurturance; authoritarian style exhibits high levels of demand but low levels of responsiveness, permissive style exhibits low levels of demand but high in responsiveness and nurturance (Dwairy, 2004). These parenting styles have been proposed to have a significant impact on a child’s development as well as academic achievement and psychological well-being. Children reared by authoritative parents are stated to have the highest levels of academic achievement, self-esteem, emotional adjustment and well-being according to Baumrind’s category of styles (Dwairy, 2004). However, these three categories are based on Western samples and have been said to describe parenting styles mainly in the West and question its limitations in describing parenting across cultures, as each style’s defining patterns may have different meanings across cultures.
“In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that ‘stressing academic success is not good for children’ or that ‘parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun.’ By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be ‘the best’ students, that ‘academic achievement reflects successful parenting,’ and that if children did not excel at school then there was ‘a problem’ and parents ‘were not doing their job.’ … Chinese parents spend approximately ten times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams” (Chua 5). Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua is an engulfing novel which clearly distinguishes the difference between Western style of parenting and the Chinese style of parenting. The quote stated above shows some of the statistics that we completed to write this book. The story is a breathless and emotional memoir of Amy Chua, consisting mostly her two daughters and husband. While the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother appears to be about the battle between a parent and a child and the relationship they share, the author, Amy Chua, has actually implied that it is important for the children to start developing skills early on to benefit in the future as well as be successful in their lives.
Similarly, Wong also grew up in America with a traditional Chinese mother. In contrast, Wong’s upbringing involves her mother forcing her into attending two different schools. After her American school day, Wong continues on with Chinese school to learn both cultures. Her mother felt it was her duty to “[. . .] learn the language of [her] heritage” (Wong 144). This puts a burden on Wong as she starts to despise the Chinese culture.
As the four women entered America, which is far from their motherland China, they experience a change of culture, the American culture, which was dominant than the Chinese. The Chinese mothers are faced with a difficult task of how to raise their American-born daughters with an understanding of their heritage. The daughters clearly show a gap in culture between the Chinese culture and American culture. The mothers wanted their daughter to follow the Chinese traditions, but the daughters followed the American traditions and even some of them got married to American men. The mothers tried to tell their daughters the story about the Chinese ancestors but the daughter could not follow them and the daughters thought their mothers were backwards and did not know what they are saying. As much as the mothers tried to show love to their daughters, the daughters usually responded negatively. They often saw their mothers’ attempts to guidance as a failure to understand the American culture. Being Chinese and living in America, both the mothers and the daughters struggle with many issues like identity, language, translation, and others. The mothers try to reconcile their Chinese pasts with their American presents; the daughters try to find a balance between independence and loyalty to their heritage
Family loyalty is a strong Asian value. Family members are encouraged to do their best because failure would bring shame and embarrassment not only to them personally but to their whole family. Guilt and shame are the main techniques used to control behavior within the family. Americans emphasize personal goals, but the Asian culture encourages family harmony and success as a group. This can cause difficulties for Asian-American children who must fit in both at school and abide by the social rules at home as well.
The Chinese mothers, so concentrated on the cultures of their own, don't want to realize what is going on around them. They don't want to accept the fact that their daughters are growing up in a culture so different from their own. Lindo Jong, says to her daughter, Waverly- "I once sacrificed my life to keep my parents' promise. This means nothing to you because to you, promises mean nothing. A daughter can promise to come to dinner, but if she has a headache, a traffic jam, if she wants to watch a favorite movie on T.V., she no longer has a promise."(Tan 42) Ying Ying St.Clair remarks- "...because I remained quiet for so long, now my daughter does not hear me. She sits by her fancy swimming pool and hears only her Sony Walkman, her cordless phone, her big, important husband asking her why they have charcoal and no lighter fluid."(Tan 64)
In this paper I will be sharing information I had gathered involving two students that were interviewed regarding education and their racial status of being an Asian-American. I will examine these subjects’ experiences as an Asian-American through the education they had experienced throughout their entire lives. I will also be relating and analyzing their experiences through the various concepts we had learned and discussed in class so far. Both of these individuals have experiences regarding their education that have similarities and differences.
There are big differences in how Chinese mothers act towards their children compared to Western mothers including the expression of feelings and approval, the worth of their children, and what is best for them. Amy Chua (2011) incorporates her own personal experiences of being a Chinese mother within her article and compares that to what she witnesses in America.
In Western society, there is a common organization called Division of Youth and Family Services, more commonly known as DYFS. DYFS’ main goal is to create a hotline to act as a safeguard to children that suffer from abusive households. When children learn about this, they choose to call this hotline because of the fact that their parents yelled at them in a threatening tone or put their hand on them. Most calls that this organization receives is from children that are not actually maltreated but are just being taught a lesson. Children need to be disciplined if they are misbehaving at home, but in Western society, this idea is twisted to formulate the idea that children are being mistreated at home, which really is not the case. Amy Chua in “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior” exemplifies her opinion on how Chinese children turn out to be more successful than Western children because of their own child disciplining techniques. It is the responsibility for parents to raise their children to be the best that they can possibly be, therefore, if the parent believes that it is beneficial fo...
Considering the argument posed in the article “Chinese Mother” that there is a better way to raise children than what most people do in the west. The author is not being persuasive because she was not prevailing for the reader to do anything, she wasn’t advising or arguing. But from reading her article she got my attention on changing my parenting style, she is persuasive in that way. Based on what I read the author wrote the article in an informative point of view. She was basically giving suggestions and informing the readers how we have different type of parenting and how one may over rule the other. She was comparing and contrasting the difference between Western and Chinese mothers, and from the looks of it I am in favor of the Chinese
The universality versus cultural specificity debate both have aspects that make sense and can be applied to childhood development. On one side, supporters of the argument for the universality of parenting suggest that certain types of parenting styles will produce the same child development outcomes in different cultures. On the other hand, the argument for cultural specificity states that different parenting practices vary from culture to culture, and that culture ultimately determines the outcomes of child development. Each culture has specific styles of parenting that instill values on children particular to that culture. Each individual has characteristics of what their parents taught them, which gives every individual their own personality. Both sides present logical information on the cultural impacts of parenting on child development outcomes.
Parenting in today’s society is extremely competitive. Raising children has become the new sport interest to the parents, and the success that the kids achieve in life is the gold medal. You see the articles in magazines, the websites online, and the ads on TV that promote the newest and greatest parenting methods used by mothers and father everywhere. The differences we see in parenting can differ from family to family, but the biggest contrast is between the different ethnicities of the world. How a Western mother raises her child may be completely different than that of a Chinese mother. These differences are the ones that are observed by author Amy Chua, as well as mothers who have read her works of literature.
“Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” is an excerpt from Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, a Yale Law professor. In this excerpt the author explains why Chinese children tend to be more successful in life and expresses her dislike towards Western parenting. The first idea Chua explains is a list of activities her daughters are allowed to do and not do in order to focus solely on academic progress. Second, the author demonstrates the contrast in mindset between Chinese mothers and Western mothers by explaining how Chinese mothers feel differently than Western mothers in regards to academic success and learning. Furthermore, she describes how Chinese mothers can demand things from their children. Finally, they can also say