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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

16:00

'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother' - Aggressive Parenting and the Cult of Excellence

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Time	Text
	Hi everybody, it's Stephen Molyneux.
	January the 16th, 2011.
	I hope you're doing very well.
	I have had a fair deluge of requests to talk about this Wall Street Journal article from January the 8th, 2011, by Amy Chua, entitled, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.
	And I'll just read a few exits from it and give you my thoughts.
	A lot of people wonder, she writes, how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids.
	They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and musical prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too.
	Well, I can tell you.
	Because I've done it.
	Here are some things my daughters were never allowed to do.
	1.
	Attend a sleepover.
	2.
	Have a playdate.
	3.
	Be in a school play.
	Complain about not being in a school play, watch TV or play computer games, choose their own extracurricular activities, get any grade less than an A, or not be the number one student in every subject except gym and drama.
	They were not allowed to play any instrument other than the piano or violin, and they were not allowed to not play the piano or violin.
	So, uh, she says Western parents who think they're being strict don't know what strictness really is.
	My Western friends, she says, who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day.
	An hour at most.
	For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part.
	It's hours two and three that get tough.
	So she goes on to talk about some general statistics which are vaguely interesting, and you can search for this, Why Chinese Mothers are Superior, on WSJ.com.
	And so let's see, once when I was young, she writes, maybe more than once, when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me garbage.
	It worked really well.
	I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done.
	But it didn't damage my self-esteem or anything like that.
	I knew exactly how highly he thought of me.
	I didn't actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage.
	The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable, even legally actionable, to Westerners.
	Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, hey fatty, lose some weight.
	By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue Talking in terms of health and never mentioning the F word.
	So on.
	Chinese parents can order their children to get straight A's.
	Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best.
	Chinese parents can say, you're lazy.
	All your classmates are getting ahead of you.
	By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement and try to persuade themselves that they're not disappointed about how their kids turned out.
	Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything, but here is, in practical terms, what she's talking about.
	Lulu was about seven, still playing two instruments and working on a piano piece called The Little White Donkey by the French composer Jacques Hidert.
	The piece is really cute, blah blah blah.
	Anyway, Lulu couldn't do it.
	We worked on it non-stop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately, over and over, but whenever we tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other, and everything fell apart.
	Finally, the day before her lesson, Lulu announced, in exasperation, that she was giving up, and she stomped off.
	Get back to the piano, now, I ordered.
	You can't make me.
	Oh, yes I can.
	Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay.
	She punched, thrashed, and kicked.
	She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds.
	I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again.
	Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have the little white donkey perfect by the next day.
	When Lulu said, I thought you were going to the Salvation Army.
	Why are you still here?
	I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years.
	When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposefully working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid.
	She couldn't do it.
	I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.
	My husband took me aside.
	He told me to stop insulting Lulu, which I wasn't even doing.
	I was just motivating her.
	And that he didn't think threatening Lulu was helpful.
	Also, he said maybe Lulu really just couldn't do the technique.
	Perhaps she didn't have the coordination yet.
	Had I considered that possibility?
	You just don't believe in her, I accused.
	That's ridiculous, Jed said scornfully.
	Of course I do.
	Sophia could play the piece when she was this age.
	But Lulu and Sophia are different people, my husband pointed out.
	Oh no, not this.
	I said rolling my eyes.
	Everyone is special in their special own way.
	I mimicked sarcastically.
	Even losers are special in their own special way.
	Well, don't worry.
	You don't have to lift a finger.
	I'm willing to put in as long as it takes and I'm happy to be the one hated.
	And you can be the one they adore because you make them pancakes and take them to Yankee games.
	I rolled up my sleeves and I went back to work.
	On Lulu.
	I used every weapon and tactic I could think of.
	We worked right through dinner, into the night.
	And I wouldn't let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom.
	The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling.
	But still, there seemed to be only negative progress, and even I began to have doubts.
	Then out of the blue, Lulu did it.
	Her hands suddenly came together, her right and left hands each doing their own imperturbable thing, just like that.
	Lulu realized it the same time I did.
	I held my breath.
	She tried it tentatively again.
	Then she played it more confidently and faster, and still the rhythm helped.
	A moment later she was beaming.
	Mommy, look!
	It's easy!
	After that she wanted to play the piece over and over and wouldn't leave the piano.
	That night she came to sleep in my bed and we snuggled and hugged.
	Hugged, cracking each other up.
	When she performed The Little White Donkey at a recital a few weeks later, parents came up to me and said, What a perfect piece for Lulu!
	It's so spunky and so her!
	Even Jed gave me credit for that one.
	Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem.
	But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up.
	On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.
	Well, I'll read one other Asian woman's response and then I'll give you my thoughts and we'll go to the show as a whole.
	This woman wrote, Drawing from personal experience, the reason why I don't feel this works is because I've seen an outcome that Amy Chua, the author, fails to address or perhaps has yet to experience.
	My big sister was what I used to jealously call every Asian parent's wet dream come true.
	She got straight A's, skipped the fifth grade, perfect.
	SAT score, varsity swim team, student council, advanced level piano, Harvard.
	Early admission, an international post with the Boston Consulting Group in Hong Kong before returning to the U.S.
	for her Harvard MBA.
	Sixth, figure salary, Oracle, PeopleSoft.
	Got engaged to a PhD, bought a home.
	Got married.
	Her life summed up in one paragraph above.
	Her death summed up in one paragraph below.
	Committed suicide a month after her wedding, at the age of 30, after hiding her depression for two years.
	She ran a plastic tube from the tailpipe of her car into the window.
	Sat there and died of carbon monoxide poisoning in the garage of her new home in San Francisco.
	Her husband found her after coming home from work, a post-it note stuck on the dashboard as her suicide note saying, sorry, and that she loved everyone.
	Mine is an extreme example, of course, but six years since her passing, I can tell you that the notion of the superior Chinese mother that my mom carried with her also died with my sister on October 28, 2004.
	If you were to ask my mom today if this style of parenting worked for her, she'll point to a few boxes of report cards, trophies, piano books, photo albums and Harvard degrees, and gladly trade it all to have my sister and gladly trade it all to have my sister back. .
	Research.
	There are multiple studies that report that despite high levels of academic achievement, Asian American students report poor psychological adjustment.
	The high level of parental interest in grades solely can create depression and anxiety for youth, and perception of parental disinterest in emotional well-being is significantly associated with depression.
	Asian American women have one of the highest suicide rates in all cultures.
	Asian American women 15 to 24 years old have the highest suicide rates among any ethnicity.
	According to the New American Media, from 1996 to 2006, of the 21 students who committed suicide at Cornell, 13 were Asian.
	This 61.9% is significantly higher than the overall percent of Asian students, which is 14.
	From 1964 to 2000, the average number of MIT undergraduate student suicides was nearly three times that of many as the national campus average.
	So, obviously there's significant mental health problems that will result from this kind of abuse.
	And it is abuse, let's not mince words.
	I have a huge amount of disdain and contempt for mere manual dexterity and competence.
	For me, if a robot can be programmed to do it, it ain't a big fucking deal.
	Can you program a robot to play this White donkey piano piece?
	Of course you can.
	You can program a piano with pieces of holes cut in paper to do it.
	It's really not a big goddamn deal.
	To tinkle some keys, however fast and accurately you may be doing it, it is not a big deal.
	Calling somebody who reproduces art an artist is like calling a photocopier a painter.
	The fact that you can copy stuff is so pathetic and meaningless and pointless, it really doesn't matter.
	Don't get me wrong, I love music and I love confidence.
	But I wonder how many of these brutalized children, who have been turned into a kind of robots, into a kind of reproducing robot, I wonder how many of them can compose music from the flower of beauty and depth of their own individual souls, rather than just plink out.
	in a repetitive robotic manner the pieces of music that have been written by other people who perhaps weren't raised in this kind of way.
	I consider it highly contemptible to focus so much on manual dexterity or even intellectual dexterity like mathematics or science or engineering relative to creativity.
	The other thing that I would say is that the great battle of the world as it stands is about the necessary intellectual resistance to unjust tyrannies.
	The unjust tyrannies of the state, and of religion, and of the statist educational system, of the money classes, of the banksters.
	The unjust authority needs to be persistently resisted.
	With all of the great furnaces of moral courage that human beings can summon within themselves, and that is an enormous power.
	The power of the roused moral outrage of a plundered citizenry is the greatest power in the social world that can be imagined.
	The future is not going to be saved by hyper-competent, brutalized, empty souls that can rapidly drum piano keys and are terrified of authority.
	It will not matter in the slight of fascism that we'll result inevitably if we do not fight back morally.
	It does not matter if the slide to fascism is accompanied by a very rapid recitation of the Flight of the Bumblebee or the White Donkey song or whatever the hell it is.
	It doesn't matter if we slide down into fascism and dictatorship with a really rapid and perfectly executed soundtrack.
	In the intellectual barricades that are going to be the near and middle future, Which side are these brutalized children, terrified of authority, subjugated to this imaginary standard of excellence which is mere vanity for the parent?
	Look, my performing monkey is very adept and adroit!
	I'm a great parent!
	Because my child plays parkour geehaw.
	There's no excellence in terms of virtue.
	There's no excellence in terms of individuality.
	There's no excellence in terms of philosophy.
	There's no excellence in terms of moral courage and standing up to unjust authority.
	Because unjust authority is used to turn them into rapid performing monkeys.
	So this is the creation of a slave class, in my opinion.
	And it doesn't matter how many concert halls they place.
	What really matters is who they're playing for, and hopefully, and they will not be of much use in this fight, most of them, but hopefully, in the piano halls of the future, they won't be playing for men and women in uniform who run the world in a Big Brother 1984 style.
	I mean, in 1984, Winston Smith is standing in front of the view screen, or the telescreen, And the quote is something like, the woman barks at him, you know, Smith!
	Winston!
	Touch your toes!
	And he says, with a violent lunge, he succeeded in touching his toes for the first time in many years.
	Absolutely.
	You can yell at someone and make them touch their toes if they're physically capable of it.
	You can yell yourself hoarse and brutalize and keep your child at a piano seat unable to pee, and they will maybe be able to train themselves through terror and through the adrenaline of fight or flight, train themselves to play a piano piece very rapidly.
	But so what?
	So what?
	Where is the moral excellence, the moral courage, the individuality, and the love of your fellow man, and the capacity, desire, courage, and will to resist the escalations of unjust authority that's spreading across the world like a dark soup?
	Well, it's not going to be present in these children, which is very tragic.
	Which is very tragic.
	Chinese culture needs to overcome communism.
	needs to rise up, spiritually, intellectually, morally, against the unjust tax farmers of the Chinese mainland.
	Are they going to do it if they're terrified of authority in this kind of way?
	No, of course not.

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