Your irony is wasted on me. IMO parents should actively encourage their child to be the best student in the class. So many talented kids amount to nothing because they're allowed to coast during their formative years. Encouraging them to be the best, teaches ambition and excellence. It doesn't matter if they don't end up being Engineers or Surgeons or what-have-you. Regardless of the life goals they purse, to succeed, they need to be always hungry for better.

I'm afraid you are unfamiliar with a key element of "tiger mothers", or in fact many asian parents at all. From what I know of my friends' families growing up, asian parents did not encourage. They required.

An encouraging hand can be a forceful hand. It's lazy to tell little Bobby that he should do math and that math is important. Sometimes you have to sit his spoiled little ass down and make him get on with it.

I did not grow up with Asian parents. I do however come from a Eastern European background. There were times when my parents forced me, kicking and screaming, into certain social and academic pursuits. They encouraged me to excel, whether I wanted to or not. I am a better human for it and I am thankful for their guidance.

I speak as somebody who had parents who pretty much neglected my academic pursuits and I emphatically disagree that a 'forceful hand' is in any way necessary for success.

I went to university and didn't do anything there, aside from sample the local herbalists' produce. I didn't do much of anything in school either. During all of that time, due to the fact that my schedule was my own (sans school-time), I managed to teach myself software development. Not because it was a good career move, or because I wanted to impress anyone but because it was interesting.

Fast forward a decade and I now earn more than pretty much all of the people I grew up with, lead software projects and have leverage and freedom up to my ears.

You might want to read about Stockholm Syndrome.

You seem to have fallen into undertaking some productive activities by sheer dumb luck. Congratulations. You are in a minority. I knew lots of pot-heads at school. All of them had lasseiz-faire parents and none of them amounted to much.

EDIT: To clarify, I do not understand your argument at all. In my experience, excellence and ambition are traits that need to be cultivated. Sure, you can find them in-the-wild, but this is not a reliable approach.

Dumb luck? I put a hell of a lot of effort into learning my craft. The point I'm trying to make is that you don't need a dictator standing over you to learn something.

By your own admission you were totally aimless. I understood from your post that nobody said to you "hey, this is an interesting and worthwhile thing to pursue". The fact that you were attracted to programming and not some useless activity (like mastering sports) seems to me the result of pure dumb luck.

I see, this is why I misunderstood your comment. You include "to force someone to do" as among the definitions of "encourage", I normally do not.

In the case of parenting, certainly. You cannot reason with a child as with an adult. Thus you make them do certain things because you know better.

Personal anecdote: when I was young I resented my parents for making me do all this "pointless crap". I even told my dad I hated him. He very calmly told me back "That's OK. You can hate me for this now. You will not hate me however when you're 22". He was right.

I don't object to that. I just don't normally refer to making people do things as "encouraging" them, so I didn't read your initial post(s) the same way as you do.