My kids are competitive—but generally in the things they are good at. My son refuses to partake in any team sport or competitive sport. He did gymnastics for a year, but he never wanted to be on the team. He is proud of his physical skills—he does martial arts now—but he still doesn’t want to compete.
We’ve encouraged him to consider competing, but we’ve never forced him to. He is also a very good pianist for his age (except for the kids of Chinese dragon mothers). It’s mostly because he gets obsessed with things. He has been obsessed with Fur Elise and now plays it quite well. He’s obsessed with smartphones and tablets now. He could probably outsell any salesman in and of the phone stores. In fact, he did at Best Buy before Christmas. Some stranger thought he could sell his services to elderly people who had no clue what was going on.
However, he’s not much into reading and writing and math. As a result my wife spends a lot of time with him, making sure he does his reading and writing a math homework. Perhaps an hour or more each night. In addition, he practices piano, although, since he’s been working on this piece, he’s been doing it on his own for long periods of time—at least an hour on most days—at least, while he was learning the piece. Lately, not so much.
This morning, my daughter told us she was back up to an A in biology. I do expect straight As and I let her know it. She asked me, “What if I got Cs?”
I said, “I would be disappointed.
“How about Bs?”
“I’d still be disappointed.”
She pouted a bit.
“I know you can do better,” I said.
I expect the best she can do. My wife was saying things like she would be happy whatever my daughter did, but I don’t want to say that. I think that working under no expectations is worse that working with high expectations. I asked my parents what they expected of me, and they always told me they had no expectations. Bullshit! They had all kinds of expectations; they just wouldn’t tell me what they were. What that mean was that no matter how well I did, I never knew if I was doing well enough. Which caused me all kinds of self-esteem problems.
I think kids need to know exactly where they are in terms of what their parents think. I also think it needs to be within the children’s capabilities. So if Chinese mothers have very high academic expectations, but their kids can do it, then their kids can be secure about where they stand. I Coloma’s daughter knows exactly where her mother will support her and that she expects her to be creative and make her own choices, and her daughter is capable of this, then she should be secure about who she is and what she can do.
I don’t think one size fits all in parenting. Parents are different and children are different. But I do think the principle I mentioned—that children should know their parents expectations, but those expectations should be within the grasp of their kids—is a good rule of thumb. I think there should be a balance between parents controlling children’s lives and children having a say in what they do and how they want to spend their time. I think that balance changes as children get older and as they demonstrate a greater capacity for good decision-making.
So much can go wrong, though. Parents can be too strict and too untrusting and they can be too loose and uncaring. They can have high expectations but never communicate them, so their children grow insecure. They can be prejudiced against some types of work or ambitions and forbid their children to pursue their interests. Then again, they can provide structure for their kids that the kids wouldn’t have otherwise and due to that, they would get lost with no goals at all—whether realistic or unrealistic.
The problem is that no one size fits all. So it’s hard to set rules for parenting. It’s hard to even set principles for making parenting decisions, I think. There is a lot of disagreement about methods. We can offer each other our experience. We can make decisions. At times, we can criticize and even take children away from parents. But that is an extreme. So much parenting behavior is allowable even if many don’t agree with the way it is done.
I’m not going to condemn Tiger Mom’s methods. In fact, I’m going to borrow some ideas from them—or rather, I borrowed them years ago when I noticed how well Asian kids were doing, and I read books about Asian families. I’m also going to include @Coloma‘s ideas (or have been doing so for many years), and I have gotten other ideas from courses in psychology and education, and communication workshops and probably hundreds of other sources of experience and information.
The bottom line, I think, for me, is that my kids feel good about themselves for good reasons; not just because they exist. I suppose others might disagree with that. Some may believe existence is all that’s necessary to feel good about themselves, and to some extent, I am sympathetic to that idea. But we’re also evolutionary animals, and we must act or die. There is no standing still. Plus, my kids need to have the skills to help them survive. I want them to feel good about their ability to survive.
I love my kids. I want them to be able to what they want and to live a life they are happy with. They may not choose to do something I like, but as long as it is a self-respecting life, then I think I will have done the best I can.
Composing members:
0
