Three friends separately forwarded me an article in the Wall Street Journal in which the author, a professor at Yale Law School, argues why what she calls “Chinese mothers” are better than “Western” ones. The article was a bit silly: not only did the author adopt an intentionally confrontational, somewhat petulant tone, but she also committed a basic statistical fallacy:
Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn’t get them, the Chinese parent assumes it’s because the child didn’t work hard enough. That’s why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child.
Actually, if a child does worse than normal on a test, he or she is more likely to do better on the next test purely because of regression toward the mean. To attribute this improvement to “sham[ing]” the child is to confuse correlation with causation. The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky noted this fallacy in their 1974 paper Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases:
In a discussion of flight training, experienced instructors noted that praise for an exceptionally smooth landing is typically followed by a poorer landing on the next try, while harsh criticism after a rough landing is usually followed by an improvement on the next try. The instructors concluded that verbal rewards are detrimental to learning, while verbal punishments are beneficial, contrary to accepted psychological doctrine. This conclusion is unwarranted because of the presence of regression toward the mean… Thus, the failure to understand the effect of regression leads one to overestimate the effectiveness of punishment and to underestimate the effectiveness of reward.
Of course, punishment might work in certain cases. But especially for the “stereotypically successful [Chinese] kids” the author describes, regression toward the mean is likely to explain much of the supposed imprvement following a poor grade. Perhaps the author did not ace an intro-level statistics or economics class?
However, my goal for this post is not to discuss statistical fallacies but rather how to explore how parents can foster both creativity and achievement in their children. (Normally I write about topics nobody else cares about, but I thought I would make an exception here since this goal is in line with the blog’s overall purpose.) First, one point that stood out from the WSJ article is that “Chinese mothers” want their children to be well-rounded, at least within academics and music, in that they have separate achievements in many different areas. However, true well-roundedness is about tying those achievements into something coherent and directly leveraging achievements in one area to do even better in another.
If parents view the development of well-roundedness in a disjointed way, I think their kids are not just less likely to make connections between different interests, but also less likely to gain much depth of knowledge in any individual interest. Take the example of spelling bees, popular among Indian Americans (many of whom probably have mothers who qualify as “Chinese”): if you view the spelling bee as a competition, without placing it in any broader context, then the most natural approach is to just spend hours memorizing spellings. If you’re diligent about this, you’ll probably do reasonably well. But I do not actually think anyone finds memorizing long lists of words that much fun, so once the spelling bee is over, you’re probably not going to continue with any interests related to spelling…because you never really developed any. On the other hand, if you relate the spelling bee to, say, a broader interest in linguistics, ethnic studies (consider the politicization of the Hindi versus Urdu divide, Dravidian linguistic nationalism, or Francization), or Old English literature, then it is way more likely that the spelling bee will enhance and bridge together your existing interests. Ironically, this approach is probably better for your immediate goal of winning the competition as well, since you are far more likely to retain new facts if you relate them to ones you already know.
So instead of forcing well-roundedness, I would try introducing someone to a lot of different areas and seeing what sticks. There are many ways to do this:
- Picking toys that encourage creativity and different ways of thinking. I think wooden blocks are the best toys ever, especially if you have so many that you almost have to work with other people. Legos can also be good, as long as you get a random assortment of pieces and not the special sets where you have to follow a bunch of instructions.
- Going to a school with a really wide range of people, from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds and where the parents are in all kinds of professions. Inviting people to your home and going to other people’s homes is very important too. Growing up in a big city makes this much easier.
- Visiting all kinds of museums: science museums, art museums, non-traditional museums like this, etc. Museums are a great way to explore a lot of areas very efficiently, so I think visiting a museum maximizes the chance that you will find something interesting and then pursue it.
- Encouraging applications. For example, if you take your kid to a science museum or read some Magic School Bus books together, you should have actual experiments prepared as a follow-up.
When doing the above, a few points are important to keep in mind:
- You should view your role, for the most part, as an enabler. You’re hoping to get your kid addicted to something, and then you just keep supplying the drugs. Occasionally an obsession can become unhealthy, but I think it’s important not to kill interests for the sake of making your kid more well-rounded.
- Your kid might become somewhat lopsided. I don’t think this is necessarily a problem, but you should view that lopsided part as providing the base for expansion into future interests. For example, your kid might be really into maps, which is great but not especially useful. Therefore, you can buy atlases that include all those nice colorful sidebars about economies and governments and cultures. There’s a good chance that your kid will branch out into at least one of these areas. In my view, this is the best way to build true well-roundedness, since new interests naturally develop from existing ones.
- All this creative stuff should not take the place of rote memorization. I actually think there has been way too much of a backlash against rote memorization and in favor of “new ways of thinking”. You can explore all the new ways of thinking you want, but if there aren’t any facts to work off of, you won’t get anywhere. It is important to keep in mind all levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. So things like memorizing spellings, multiplication tables, or really anything will always be important, no matter how much people rely on calculators or Google or Wikipedia.
- Going off of the last point, there should be some kind of constant evaluation. After you go to a museum, you should be making sure that your kid did actually learn something, and if not, find out why. For example, maybe the museum didn’t have enough interactive exhibits and next time you need to build up interest by doing some science experiments before going to the museum. Passively thinking that your kid will always absorb stuff on his or her own is a terrible idea.
Finally, I do not think it is useful to make distinctions between ethnic groups or use terms like “Chinese mother” and “Western mother”. I am not entirely convinced that there are any meaningful differences between parents from different ethnic groups, once you control for factors like socioeconomic background and parents’ education. But more importantly, even if there were, what would we actually do with this result? Our goal should be to identify the strongest elements of different parenting models. Whether those elements are Chinese or Western or Burusho is uninformative and distracts from the most useful information.