pardon my french, but you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
this is not even remotely true, this is a trope, an outdated stereotype. oftentimes these kids come out socially maladjusted, suicidal and/or homicidal, or somewhere else on the human spectrum other than 'great'. this 'model minority' viewpoint is harmful in the extreme.
and for the past 20 or so years the 'restaurant' or 'dry cleaner' is more likely to be 'software company' or 'biotech company'. or even something mundane like "works for the port authority" or "imports couches from malaysia."
things have changed slightly since the 1960s, okay?
go to a University of California campus and ask how many of the thousands of asian kids you see if their parents owned a dry cleaner or a restaurant. you're going to either get laughed at, or punched in the face for asking offensive questions.
this is hackernews, i would expect a little bit more depth of thought than "asian immigrants own dry cleaners and their kids are so well behaved." are you SERIOUS?
Uh, I'm the child of asian immigrant parents and know tons of people who are also, so I do kinda know what I'm talking about.
> oftentimes these kids come out socially maladjusted, suicidal and/or homicidal, or somewhere else on the human spectrum other than 'great'.
Kids from all sorts of upbringings come out that way. Those are outliers. In my experience, kids from asian immigrant households are far less likely to suffer from more run of the mill maladies: aimlessness, lack of motivation, drug use that interferes with life, etc.
> this 'model minority' viewpoint is harmful in the extreme.
My super competitive east coast high school, which has a race-blind admissions system, has a freshman class this year that's 65% asian in a county that's only 18% asian. These kids are vastly disproportionately the children of relatively recent immigrants. Asian overachieving isn't an imagined phenomenon, and parenting style has a lot to do with it.
> and for the past 20 or so years the 'restaurant' or 'dry cleaner' is more likely to be 'software company' or 'biotech company'.
My comment was directed at asian immigrants who own dry cleaners and restaurants, it doesn't presume that all asian immigrants own dry cleaners and restaurants.
> go to a University of California campus and ask how many of the thousands of asian kids you see if their parents owned a dry cleaner or a restaurant.
Most of the asian kids at UCB aren't the children of recent immigrants (California has a very large well-assimilated asian population). Most children of recent asian immigrants aren't at UCB.
it's really easy to be 'proud' of achievement and cheerlead and go "look at us aren't we great" but you need to be aware of selection and survivor bias, especially in the context of your elite east coast schooling which you prattle on about so boastfully.
during my life i have known plenty of underachieving cokehead rich kid asians and struggling yet intelligent lower class inner city asians.
I'm not describing it as the mode or the mean. I'm saying that, per my anecdotal experience, asian kids at any given income level are less likely to turn out with serious problems than other kids at the same income level.
> it's really easy to be 'proud' of achievement and cheerlead and go "look at us aren't we great"
I'm not cheerleading. I don't even identify as "asian" in any meaningful sense. My point is to address the myth that raising good kids means sacrificing your time to go to their school plays and little league games and whatnot. I use asians as an example not to cheerlead, but because that myth is far less prevalent among immigrant asian parents.
> especially in the context of your elite east coast schooling which you prattle on about so boastfully.
There's nothing elite about it, it's a public school. I mention it because: 1) it's got a race-blind admissions system, unlike elite colleges, so the asian population isn't artificially deflated; 2) it's a pretty stark example of asian over-representation, in a county where the median household income for asians, while high, is actually less than that for whites by a substantial margin. I also specifically mention the "east coast" part, because in my experience east coast asians are far less assimilated than west coast asians, as there is a far smaller population of asians who have been in the U.S. for generations.
Again, this article was a criticism directed at Sheryl Sandberg, implying that she gave her kids a compromised upbringing by not making them her only priority. And I think that's a load of crap.
The asian kids that do come out hardworking and studious from our tiger parents are not all rainbows and sprinkles either, as many are stunted in emotional development and social communication due to the extreme discipline and pressure we had to deal with growing up.
Lastly, and most ironically, asian immigrant parents always push their kids to be the best, and being "good enough" is never enough. The pressure to achieve, the detached politeness of the traditional asian culture -- there are plenty of cracks that a misguided teenager could fall into.
"Good enough" can be applied to job, money, work, and any other tangible thing. But humans and emotions make the world go 'round, and when you have the future of an innocent, malleable human being in your hands, there is no such thing as "good enough" parenting. That is the entire dilemma being discussed here for women - compromising to be "good enough" at work so that they can be "good to the best of their ability" for their children. Not the other way around.
NO IT'S NOT. I am asian american and have encountered many of these people in my life and career. these people are broken.
Besides that, the other stuff is racism or at least ethnocentrism. Contemporary American culture places a weird value on being "well rounded" that is alien both to asian culture and to American culture of years past. That's where a lot of the pressure on parents to invest time comes from--gotta take little Timmy to soccer practice and school plays so he'll be "well rounded." Gotta invest the time to help him cultivate a wide range of interests and hobbies, get involved in the community, etc. It's an upper-class pretension that harkens back to the days when having a variety of hobbies and interests was the mark of the elite who didn't have to work for a living.
In a second generation Asian (or in my case Indian) family, the grandparents are still working full time, they live in a different city, and there's no family owned business which can provide a flexible schedule and avoid tax/labor laws for the immigrant model to work. Parents have to step up or pay for round the clock childcare.
This style of parenting - on a purely anecdotal level - is producing near disasters of people. Especially from a North American culture's perspective. I see a lot of these bad habits in Caucasian parents as well. Over-scheduled, overworked and over-pampered kids that can't make a single choice on their own, can't accept failure and don't even know what they like!.
It's about identifying the costs and benefits and it is different for everyone because the benefits are not measurable. If your immigrant family invested in a security system and hired an employee to manage the store so they could spend fewer hours there, that cost is measurable. Their added well being or happiness from spending that time with their children instead of at their business is not easily quantifiable and is more of a feeling. The point of the article is that for many people the trade is worth it and they're better off spending more time with family than at work.
Besides, the excessive hours running your business is the e-myth anyhow. They're better off learning how to leverage the work of others.
All that being said, some people want to have kids but they really don't enjoy spending a lot of time with kids (even their own). Those people are definitely better served by focusing on their work and outsourcing childcare.
That's certainly true, but orthogonal to what I'm talking about. It's one thing to downshift your career because you want to spend more time with your kids. It's another thing to do so because you tell (incorrectly) that working long hours is "not compatible with family life." My objection is to people who justify downshifting because of imagined benefits to the kids, not real benefits to themselves.
My model is really asian immigrant families. Those families where the parents work all day at a restaurant or dry cleaner, for far more than the "50 hours a week" the author here finds "not compatible with family life." And generally their kids come out great. Hard working and studious. That's "good enough" parenting.