Asian versus Western Parental Demands: A Deepening Rift?

I recently read this really interesting article in the NY Times on a school district in the US, where parental opinions on curriculum and academic pressure are severely divided along racial lines. Apparently, the White parents in this particular school are pressuring the school to reduce academic competition and pressure, while Asian parents, mostly immigrants, are anxious that the school will then be reducing standards, "dumbing down education," and preventing their children from excelling academically.

Here are some interesting extracts from the article:

"On the other side are parents like Mike Jia, one of the thousands of Asian-American professionals who have moved to the district in the past decade, who said Dr. Aderhold’s reforms would amount to a “dumbing down” of his children’s education.

“What is happening here reflects a national anti-intellectual trend that will not prepare our children for the future,” Mr. Jia said.

About 10 minutes from Princeton and an hour and a half from New York City, West Windsor and Plainsboro have become popular bedroom communities for technology entrepreneurs, pharmaceutical researchers and engineers, drawn in large part by the public schools. From the last three graduating classes, 16 seniors were admitted to M.I.T. It churns out Science Olympiad winners, classically trained musicians and students with perfect SAT scores.

The district has become increasingly popular with immigrant families from China, India and Korea. This year, 65 percent of its students are Asian-American, compared with 44 percent in 2007. Many of them are the first in their families born in the United States.

They have had a growing influence on the district. Asian-American parents are enthusiastic supporters of the competitive instrumental music program. They have been huge supporters of the district’s advanced mathematics program, which once began in the fourth grade but will now start in the sixth. The change to the program, in which 90 percent of the participating students are Asian-American, is one of Dr. Aderhold’s reforms. (bolding mine)"

The article was intriguing, and in some ways it mirrors the discussions I have with parents here in Singapore as well. International schools in Singapore often have a fairly even split between White and Asian families, and this demographic often creates a sort of split personality for the school, pulling it in two entirely different directions. Asian parents tend to want more "academic rigor," whereas Western parents worry that the programs are becoming too competitive and rigorous for their children.

Is it possibly for schools to address the concerns while still maintaining respect for both cultural attitudes towards parenting and education? Also, how can schools run by European and American faculty and administrators become more sensitive to the ways in which Asians view education and parenting? Perhaps the answer is to engage in more cross-cultural dialogue so that both sides actually talk to each other and learn from each other-- taking one side or another seems to be a recipe for disaster, as it will inevitably alienate half the school's population.

Aunties, Uncles, and Allo-parenting

When I first arrived in Singapore, I was surprised by how quickly I felt at home here. I had never visited Singapore before, and I knew so little about the city-state. Yet, feeling tropical sun on my back and seeing bright flashes of pink bougainvillea made me feel at home. In so many ways, Singapore reminded me of Chennai, my childhood-home.

While the tropical landscape comforted me, what made me feel most at home was the "auntie-uncle culture." Much like in Chennai, every adult here is an auntie or an uncle to every child. Now this may seem kind of ridiculous. If every single adult is an auntie or an uncle, then what do those words even mean? Does the overuse of those words render them meaningless? I think not.

I believe that the way a child addresses an elder is very important. To start with, the terms auntie and uncle imply a familial relationship, suggesting that  adults must treat all children as if they are part of the same family. In other words, all adults need to work together to raise children, and simultaneously, children need to respect and obey all the adults they encounter, as they would their own family members.

These terms originate from a community-orientation. Historically, most Asians were raised in strong communities; in Singapore, kids grew up in communal kampongs; in India and China, they grew up in large joint-families with three generations living together under one roof.  While Asia has industrialized rapidly over the last fifty years, it is still attached, at least in theory, to the ideals of community, extended family networks, and communal child-rearing.

In traditional societies, all the adults in a community or tribe are responsible for the well-being and socialization of the younger generation. In his book The World Until Yesterday: What the modern world can learn from traditional societies, Jared Diamond describes the benefits of "allo-parenting," or communal parenting. When a kid is jointly raised, disciplined, and loved by multiple adults, he/she grows up with a strong sense of belonging to a larger community. This practice not only diminishes the pressure placed on parents, but it also helps children feel secure. Each child has many adult role-models, many adults that he can turn to when he needs advice, support, or help. The popular saying "It takes a village to raise a child"  is another way of thinking about the benefits of "allo-parenting" and traditional wisdom.

As allo-parenting is becoming increasingly endangered in the modern, developed world with its impersonal apartment buildings and fast-paced lifestyles, I think that the "auntie-uncle" cultures of the East should try to preserve these practices as much as possible. In Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers,  the American psychiatrist Gordon Neufeld documents the price that families pay when they are no longer part of a cohesive community. When parents don't have a community to help them raise their kids, they become stressed and exhausted. Simultaneously, when kids don't have a strong network of supportive adults to draw on, kids often turn to peers to fill the vacuum and the results are dangerous and frightening.

On a related note, over the weekend, I watched a Bollywood movie with my husband, and I began to think about the ubiquitous presence of grandparents and extended family members in the movie.  In contrast, your average Hollywood movie doesn't even feature parents, let alone grandparents or aunts/uncles. The young twenty-something heroes and heroines of Hollywood are forced to rely entirely on themselves and their peers for guidance; they get nothing from the older generation. In contrast, the young protagonists of Bollywood have a whole cast of older family members to turn to for comfort, support, guidance, and help. While neither Hollywood nor Bollywood reflects reality, they do reveal something about what their respective societies seem to value or idealize. Clearly, allo-parenting and extended family networks are still idealized in the East, though with 21st century lifestyles, they may become endangered.

Suggestions for parents (adapted from Neufeld's book):

- Socialize as a family with other families; multi-generational socializing is healthy for kids and adults alike. Your kids should know your friends. They should have lots of aunties and uncles that they feel close to. This is important even when (particularly when) your children are teenagers.

- Make sure you know your kids' friends, and ideally, their friends' parents as well. Again, this is fairly easy when your kids are young, but it gets harder as they get older. Yet, Neufeld argues that it is particularly important with teens because they are most vulnerable to toxic "peer effects."

- Spend a lot of time with your kids and make sure that you and the other adults in their lives (grandparents, aunts etc.) are their go-to people for questions and crises. Their peers should never replace the older generation. Again, this is particularly important for adolescents, who could get very skewed advice from friends.

- Make time for family dinners, family outings, and family days.

- Involve grandparents, aunts, and uncles in your lives as much as possible, and talk about "family stories" with your kids. Make sure the kids know their extended family well. Weekend Skype sessions are important if the grandparents live far away. If you're not close to your family, then create a similar network with friends.

And here are some other Singapore-specific suggestions:

-  If you have a domestic helper, encourage your children to think of her as part of your family. She is a crucial part of your "allo-parenting network," and both she and the kids will benefit from a close familial relationship.

- Encourage your child to read Asian literature and mythology -- most Asian stories seem to glorify and idealize familial relationships and community structures. Watching Bollywood movies helps too. These stories will implicitly teach kids that family matters a lot, and they could provide some sort of balance to the other messages that kids get about the need to be independent, rebellious, and "peer-oriented".

Creating A Math-Rich Home

How come there is SO much research on reading and language in early childhood, but such a terrible dearth of research on math in early childhood? Every book I read on education, parenting, and child development says that the single most important thing a parent can do for a young child is to read to the child on a daily basis and immerse the child in a language-rich environment.

But what about Math? Interestingly, when I hang out and chat with Indian and Chinese moms in Singapore, they spend a lot more time thinking about Math than reading. "What do you do for Math" is a question I encounter all the time because I live in Asia and hang out with South-Asian and East-Asian mothers. And these mathematically oriented moms spend a lot of time making sure that their kids build strong math foundations, and not surprisingly, their children excel in math and science.

So what should a mom do about Math in the early years?  Here are some ideas on how to create a mathematical home. These ideas are drawn both from conversations with "mathematical moms" and from two specific books: What's Math Got To Do With It, by Jo Boaler, a Stanford University professor, and Pink Brain, Blue Brain, by Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist who examines the relationship between visual-spatial skills and math/science achievement.

Engage your child in activities and games that will develop number sense, visual-spatial abilities, and problem solving abilities. Research shows that all these three strands are tightly correlated with math success in school and beyond. While most people already know how directly correlated number sense and problem solving abilities are with math achievement, they may not know that most students who excel in higher level math and science also need good visual-spatial abilities, or the ability to understand shapes and to manipulate objects in their minds. These skills are (quite obviously) necessary to succeed in more abstract math and physics.

Suggestions:

For Number Sense:

Board games such as Snakes 'n' Ladders, Yahtzee, and Monopoly
Dice (invent and play games with dice)
Cards (all kinds of card games; even just "add the cards")
An Abacus (must have manipulative)
A Measuring Tape (measure your furniture; measure the kids -- how tall are they?)
Create a huge number line and put it on the wall of your kids' room.
When you're in the car, play number games (can you guess the number? how quickly can you add these numbers up? Let's do Mental math!)

Integrate Math conversations into all your daily activities with children --
 "grocery store math" (Find me five tomatoes; now add two more tomatoes, how many do we have?)
"cooking math"(Can you add 3 eggs;  Let's measure one cup of milk)
"elevator math" (riding an elevator is like riding a number line -- get kids to add and subtract in the elevator, get them to recognize numbers, point out that you're riding up and down the number line.)

For Problem Solving:
Games such as Connect Four
CHESS (excellent game for strategizing)
Give kids interesting word problems and math puzzles to solve (Singapore Math is a great resource for this.)
Jigsaw puzzles
Identify and extend patterns of all kinds (numbers, shapes, words etc.)

For Visual-Spatial Skills:
Blocks, Legos, K'Nex and any other building activity that involves manipulating objects.
Tangrams (disembedding shapes and problem solving)
Tetris (great online game for understanding how shapes fit together)
Blik Blok
Origami
Jigsaw puzzles
Measurement Activities
Geometry Activities (drawing shapes, extending patterns, understanding shapes)
Noticing patterns in the world around you -- in nature, in architecture, in art etc.
Programming for children: Scratch, Logo, Lego-programming/robotics

Just as creating a language-rich environment primes kids for success in school by developing verbal skills and thinking skills, creating a mathematically-rich environment in the home also primes kids for educational success by developing their ability to solve problems and their understanding of numbers and shapes. Integrating mathematical conversations, activities, and puzzles into everyday family life can help kids begin to understand the importance and beauty of Math.

For a more detailed discussion of math, see one of my older posts: Math-rich homes.