What is a parent to do?
Talking with my daughter this morning, she lamented how one minute she is urged to raise her child’s self-esteem by demanding more effort and more achievement and the next minute she is told that our children are over-stressed because too much is demanded of them. She referred to feeling as if she is reacting to “parenting advice du jour”.
The excerpts from Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother that were recently printed in the Wall Street Journal and then went viral over the internet have sparked much discussion about parenting. Some people have raised vigorous objections to what has been seen as Amy Chua’s “mean” parenting style. She didn’t allow her children to participate in sleep-overs or have play dates. She insisted that they practice their music and study and get straight As.
Yet others make the observation that the following point from her book is well-taken:
“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.”
When faced with the outcry claiming Amy Chua is an abusive parent because of the demands she placed upon her children, David Brooks in a New York Times article (January 17, 2011) makes a bold statement: “I have the opposite problem with Chua. I believe she’s coddling her children. She’s protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn’t understand what’s cognitively difficult and what isn’t.”
He counters that the truly hard learning occurs when we must work in groups and learn to get along with each other, while also learning to read social cues:
(referring to sleep-overs and other social situations) “…these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.”
“Yet mastering these arduous skills is at the very essence of achievement. Most people work in groups. We do this because groups are much more efficient at solving problems than individuals (swimmers are often motivated to have their best times as part of relay teams, not in individual events).”
He goes on, “…. Participating in a well-functioning group is really hard. It requires the ability to trust people outside your kinship circle, read intonations and moods, understand how the psychological pieces each person brings to the room can and cannot fit together.”
“This skill set is not taught formally, but it is imparted through arduous experiences. These are exactly the kinds of difficult experiences Chua shelters her children from by making them rush home to hit the homework table.”
Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker (January 31, 2011) addresses the issue of self-esteem in a different way. She notices that in the recent Programme for International Student Assessment (or PISA) tests, students from the United States ranked seventeenth in reading, twenty-third in science and thirty-first in math. “This ranking put American kids not just behind the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Singaporeans but also after the French, the Austrians, the Hungarians, the Slovenians, the Estonians, and the Poles.”
She claims that Americans have been taught to always encourage their kids and that this will increase their self- esteem. Researchers at the Brookings Institution compared the students’ assessments of their abilities with their scores. Nearly forty per cent of American eighth grade students agreed “I usually do well in mathematics” but only seven per cent of students got enough correct to qualify as having advanced ability in math.
So how do we reconcile these varying opinions on what is best for our children? Do we want them to have a realistic sense of their abilities? Do we want to push them to do their best?
Can parents find the balance between sensitivity and leadership? If these are not two mutually exclusive traits, then we will want to give our children opportunities to work in groups, to learn to get along with others. At the same time we will want to make sure that we are teaching our children the value of hard work, of self-discipline, of patience and persistence.
Certainly Ragazzi addresses the benefits of group learning. Singers in Ragazzi learn to work as a team, they learn to express their emotions, they learn to achieve as a group. We work to provide a place for your sons to build the intellectual skills and the character traits that lead to achievement. Boys work hard in Ragazzi, learning to manage their time and juggle the various demands on them. All of these things contribute to real, earned self-esteem and ultimately to a happy and productive life.
Joyce Keil, Artistic Director
Ragazzi Boys Chorus
