Am I The Worst Asian American Parent Ever?

By Tim | Monday, June 6, 2011 | 39 Comments

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271362993 df148766da z Am I The Worst Asian American Parent Ever?
With all the recent focus on Tiger Moms and dads, along with almost everything I find lately on the internet, I can’t help but wonder, “Am I the worst Asian American parent ever?” It doesn’t help that my own cousin is sending his kids to after school Chinese tutoring school for math and reading (I mean really, does a 3 year old need to know arithmetic already?) because he doesn’t think the public school and daycare are challenging enough for them.

Let me give you some context on where I’m coming from. As a parent, I’m concerned with the quality of education our daughter is going to get going to a public school that has only mediocre ratings. I spend some of my free time looking at real estate and on real estate blogs to try and determine if it makes sense for us to move to a better school district. What amazes me about these blogs is the prevalence of posts talking about buying a home just for the school district. In the Bay Area, where I live, you can only buy a home in Palo Alto, Los Altos, or Cupertino if you want a good school.

As you might have guessed, we don’t live in any of those cities, nor is buying a home in any of those school districts on our short or long range plans. First, it’s near impossible, since a reasonable home in any of those cities easily starts at $1 million. And so that’s where the “worst Asian American parent ever” comes from. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only parent not scheming or trying to figure out a way to get my child in a Cupertino or Palo Alto school. And all those posts make it seem like some how I’m depriving my child by not sending her to one of these top tier schools in these cities.

You might be thinking, well, why don’t you just find a good school in cheaper area? In fact many on real estate forums recommend looking for a school with API scores above 850 or even 900 that aren’t in one of those coveted cities. We actually didn’t go the public school route last fall. In fact where we live, our local elementary has an API of 785, but that alone wasn’t enough to convince us to send our daughter to a private school for kindergarten last fall. The straw that broke the camel’s back was that kindergarten class sizes went from 20 students to 1 teacher, to 33 to 1 at the beginning of last school year, and we were afraid our daughter would get lost in the noise. As much as it bothered my liberal ideals, I sent my daughter to private school for kindergarten. It was a stretch for us this past year, and one we’re not able to repeat for her education for first grade this coming fall.

So while it’s nearly impossible for us to move to one of those coveted cities, we were able to request a different public school for first grade for our daughter through open enrollment, but even that only got us to an elementary school with a 798 API score (although if you look at the breakdown, Asians attending our new elementary had an API of 851).

I felt a little better about myself as a parent until we started looking at Chinese language school options for our daughter. I’ve blogged previously about her lack of Chinese language skills, so we needed a way for her to start picking up some Chinese and we thought we’d better do it by first grade. You’d think that finding a Chinese school in the SF Bay Area would be easy, but it turns out it’s pretty competitive. The Chinese school we were going for, based on recommendations, location, and convenience, turned out to have a requirement for testing prior to entry (even for new students who don’t speak any Chinese). Their website warns that they can limit entry based on test results since classes often fill, so entry into a class is restricted to the highest scoring test results. So we’re re-evaluating whether it makes sense to have her in this high-competition environment. We haven’t made a final decision yet, but it still pains me that we haven’t found a way for her to learn Chinese. This makes me wondering again if I’m the worst Asian American parent ever.

That’s when I have to remind myself: I went to a mediocre school and I’ve had more successes in my life than most people I know. MY school certainly didn’t place any limitations on my achievements or my ability to succeed. Regardless, it’s hard to keep that point of view in an overwhelming flood of opinion in the opposite direction.

[Photo Courtesy of limonada]

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ellebee11

Great post Tim. However, doesn’t the Tiger Mom book encourage you to think that it’s not what school your child goes to that ensures success – but the influence/support/guidance from the parents at home that raises a kid ready for success. If you read about all the successful people in the world – most of them credit their parents, home life, or key mentors that helped them get to their point – not which school they went to.
mamazilla

i don’t think any parent – asian american or otherwise – ever stops wondering if you were or are the worst parent ever… we also worried about getting our children into a really good public school. here in chicago, all the good schools are in affluent neighborhoods too. now, we rent in one of the areas w/ two of the best schools in the city. we toured them but we opted for the catholic school instead. i didn’t like how the word competitive and achievement were repeated over and over and coming from an art background – i didn’t like that there was very little outside academics in the curriculums. also, i had heard that there wasn’t much of a community at either school. in the end, my kids are happy and doing very well in school academically and socially… they learn about being filipino, speaking tagalog from me, my large extended family and their classmates… so, it doesn’t matter to me if i get labeled “worst asian american parent ever”… my kids think i’m the “BEST MOM EVER”- that’s all the accolades i need…
timat8asians

@ellebee11 While that may be true in the book, it’s certainly not true among the Asian tiger parents here in the Bay Area, where they plan to get their kids in the best school possible, and it really does seem like you’ve got some shortcoming if you aren’t doing the same for your child.
bubmomom

As an Asian-American, I have to say that this is probably one of the key reasons I am happy NOT to be living in a heavily Asian area like the SF Bay Area. This is the Asian version of “keeping up with the Joneses.” Tim, don’t get your family caught up in this competition. It’s so warped. Think about what’s best for your child and your own family and don’t listen to what others around you are saying or doing. It sounds like you have the right attitude but are second-guessing yourself. However, if you’re really unhappy about the schools in your town and can’t afford to buy a house in Palo Alto, Cupertino, or Los Altos, you’ve always got the choice to leave the Bay area. I attended an excellent public high school in Houston (years ago), and currently my kids are in a good school system in the Sacramento area. There are Asian and Asian-American families outside of the Bay area like my family that are maintaining a more balanced outlook on our kids’ education.
yu888

WHy is it that we, as Asian Americans have this almost innate guilt complex when it comes to educating our kids? We opted to keep our child in public school despite the 30 to 1 ratio, and even turned down the magnet program school because we wanted to stay and support the local neighborhood school and take part in their bilingual program. No, not Chinese, but Spanish.

The way we see it, the neighborhood school will allow the kids to stay close to home, make friends close to home, but still get multiple exposure to the arts (school has an arts program with resident art, music AND drama teacher), bilingual education that will effectively provide immersion exposure of Spanish to an already bilingual kid, and force us to work harder at supporting our local schools for without real parental support, the public school system is doomed. And if that happens, then the spending patterns favoring prison spending will likely become the norm as without an education, many kids of today will likely end up in that other system.

But no, I do not think it makes parents ” bad AsAm parents” when these choices are ultimately made considering the big picture. In fact, I would venture to say that as As-Ams rather than immigrant Asians in America, we have a unique perspective on how we define success, and many of us would NOT define it the way Tiger Mom does. In our case, we hope to raise a well rounded child who will be given an array of experiences and choices that will help make a well rounded adult someday who will hopefully have a variety of tools available to find happiness and success as he defines it. It appears that your decision making process is based on a similar thought process and has the big picture as the end goal. If so, then I don’t think you should beat yourself up over it.
A_Lee

Hi Tim, a couple thoughts.

1. Tying back to the “Are Asians the Smartest” post by Koji, I made it pretty clear that I think IQ is a useful measure of intelligence. If you believe that as well, you can be assured that intelligence is mostly genetic. As long as your daughter isn’t malnourished, traumatized, or poisoned, your child will perform pretty much independently of her environment. Remember, adopted Korean babies raised in white Midwestern families ended up having the same academic outcomes as immigrant Korean children.

2. Intensive immersive programs for small children can create differences in IQ when little (below the age of 10), but these differences disappear entirely by adulthood. Studies of programs like Head Start show that they have some effect on young children, but those effects are gone by the time they are 18 years old.

3. Chinese (or any) language skills are definitely best learned when young. Speaking from personal experience, having a deep knowledge of Chinese history and culture is a useful tool when creating a minority-ethnicity identity, and I think your daughter will end up with a more confident, more sophisticated way of interacting with the larger American society. You can hunt around this blog for my stories about this.

4. I definitely think there is something to be said for not staying in the 50%+ Asian cocoon areas of SF/Bay Area. Awesome food, yes, but not realistic. Learning to communicate and empathize effectively with other people is something

So to sum up:

Don’t believe the hype – getting into the “right school”, particularly when young, has little effect on adult outcomes. As a elementary-school child, not going to the absolutely “best” school will have no effect. Basically, you’ve done all the hard work already. You’re a smart person, with a good, committed, stable family, and you make enough money to live in a safe neighborhood and feed your your kids nutritious diets. That’s the cake. Going to Montessori is just deciding what color the icing should be. If you feel unconvinced by this, read Bryan Caplan’s “Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids.”

Also, I would encourage you to have your daughter learn Chinese, not for the China/economy/Thomas Friedman reasons, but just for her own confidence in developing her identity.
timat8asians

@mamazilla I agree, I think every parent wonders if they aren’t doing enough for their child, and it’s one of main reasons I wrote this article, because when comparing myself to the other Asian American parents (which I know is a bad idea), I certainly pale in comparison. But I also know things like which school she goes to will not actually determine how smart she is, or how well she does ultimately, it will have some small little part to play.

So for now, I’ll just be content in thinking I’ve done what I can, and it’s really a problem, we’ll go back to the private school next year.
raymonst

imo, if you’re worrying about being a good parent and all that, chances are you’re not a bad parent.

a bad parent won’t give a crap.
http://annedreshfield.wordpress.com/ annedreshfield

Hi Tim, this is an intriguing post for me to read — I have a lot of Asian-American friends, and I went to middle school in the Bay Area before moving to Barrington, Illinois for high school. My parents were extremely happy that I was able to attend a “much better” high school than the one I would have attended in California. However, as I’ve progressed onto college, I can honestly tell you that not many people I know credit their schools for getting them where they are. Even at the “better” high school I attended, there were always parents who were pushing after-school classes, college classes, and countless extra-curriculars on their kids. One of my best friends in high school is Asian-American, and her parents were concerned with her pursuing her music (we were duet partners all four years of school). I think that kind of pushing occurs nearly everywhere, regardless of the school’s caliber.
John T. Nguyen

My experiences growing up as a 1st generation lower-income Vietnamese-American has taught me one thing: it doesn’t matter.

My mother was the ultimate teacher in learning and quality education. Even though my schools (K-12) was considered “mediocre”, she spent time with me in the library every Monday. I picked up on everything that interested me and spent about four hours or more, constantly reading.

And yes, my mom has her moments of being a “tiger mom” but I understood what she wanted to instill. A love of learning and excellence at comprehension. As time passed, it paid off in huge dividends. I ended up with two medals in high school, 2nd place for Economics and 3rd for Biology. I’m now holding a 3.8 GPA in the college that I’m currently attending.

I understand that everyone else have different types of lifestyles to do this. But it’s much cheaper and enriching to spend a few hours with the children every week and foster a love of learning by praising them for seeking knowledge and discipline them for choosing ignorance.

But the point I’m making: the school doesn’t make you a good parent. It’s your involvement.
http://www.bigwowo.com/ bigWOWO

Holy c$%p, the cheapest home in those areas are a million dollars? Remind me to stop complaining about prices of living in Portland! And I’m absolutely shocked that more people haven’t ridden the Chinese immersion bandwagon and set up schools all over SF, although starting a school most definitely isn’t easy.

I don’t know how much early school education matters; I know lots of people who went to so-so elementary schools and turned out fine. I do believe that middle school and grade school are important–the crucial difference is that older kids have to learn to plan their school academics and goals, while elementary school kids mostly learn basic skills.
timat8asians

@bigWOWO For those cities, many on the real estate forums ask where’s the bubble? Homes continue to sell above asking, with multiple bids, especially if they are under-priced. My aunt and uncle used to rent near Lynbrook high school to get their sons into that high school. They rented a tiny 1100 square foot home built in the late ’50s. Right now, similar homes for sale in that neighborhood go for between $965k and $1.2 million. Yet, the average home price in the Bay Area is around $500k. So you can see there’s a big skew upwards for homes in the desirable school locations.
timat8asians

@bigWOWO I should also mention that with the recent LinkedIn IPO, and expected future IPO’s from Facebook and other Silicon Valley Web 2.0 companies, prices in the desirable school cities for houses are only expected to go up.
http://www.bigwowo.com/ bigWOWO

@timat8asians Tim, if the house prices are expected to go up, now might be the time to buy!!! Just kidding. It really sounds like there’s a huge competitive market for houses in that area, and with all those high tech companies, there is probably a salary war taking place as well.

I don’t know about California, but I know that many people have said that public schools often have great resources, it’s just that kids have to fight for them. One friend of mine who went to public school says that public schools are better, because “it teaches you to deal with dumbasses who can’t be expelled for being dumb.” He said that your kid will learn how to deal better with people all across the spectrum, and that he or she will learn to fight to get ahead instead of being satisfied with the status quo.

But this, of course, is contingent on parents maintaining somewhat high standards of schooling. I’m not yet at that point in my own parenting career, but hopefully we’ll all do well when we get there. I wouldn’t be able to afford a $1 million dollar home either!
GFP_Tagged

Well, my high school was considered “mediocre” (or by Asian standard, even worse), but I aced my national admission tests and I was the valedictorian of my class who got the highest score on every single one of AP classes and tests. I did this without getting any tutoring too. I really don’t think it’s the school that matters. Also, if you want your daughter to speak your native language, I suggest you to speak only Chinese in your household. This includes everyone in the family. I have a 2nd generation Ko-American friend who speaks Korean better than the native, and he can do this because his parents has really made sure that everyone speaks Korean (and no English whatsoever- not even a word) in the household. Also, I’ve heard of a similar case with a Japanese-American family. I hope you can fight the pressure and let her enjoy while she can!
jeffat8asians

Tim, you care enough to worry about your daughter’s education – you definitely aren’t the worst Asian American parent ever. While everybody is talking about Tiger moms, people don’t seem to realize that there are plenty of Asian American parents who are extremely disengaged from their children’s educations and don’t push or encourage them.
MaximillianLee

Balloon Boy’s mother beat you to that title.

The pregnant guest writer who felt entitled to a subway seat, and when she didn’t get one, decided to pout and blast her entire race even though (assumingly) no one forced her to get pregnant and was still mobile, and that the lesson from her story is that if you kick up your heels, let a man have their way, and get a positive pregnancy test, you can use your pregnancy to get everything you want — she comes a close second.
ellebee11

@timat8asians The private schools and after school programs are all good and dandy, but it is still a business. Don’t fall into the pressure that your kid being in a specific school or program will guarantee her/him success or even acquiring the skillset to achieve success. It actually may do more harm than good for some kids – if they learn about disappointment from not getting accepted into something – they may get the false belief that now they are doomed and can’t attain their goals.

I would recommend reading “Bounce” by Syed or “The Talent Code” by Coyle. Empowering your kids to understand that the key to success is within themselves (i know, sounds so corny) and what they do with their will and skill (mostly will) would be the best thing. Being amongst peers in all the above mentioned schools will only foster the wrong beliefs that a certain school/degree/job/firm is necessary to get to the next level. It is competitive out there, it’s the same environment here in the NYC/NJ area. Here, you may have a 2 mil dollar house, but you end up still paying $1,000/month for private PRESCHOOL b/c that’s what everyone else is doing in your neighborhood. …… Don’t let your kid join the same rat race. Let them create their own race that goes even faster than “the right track.”
Boogerhead

this reminds me of that Demi Moore movie The Jones as in Keeping up with the Jones
timat8asians

@ellebee11 I definitely agree it’s a business. For private kindergarten, we’ve paid $1115 a month, and yet the school runs fundraisers all the time and continues to ask us to contribute money over and beyond the amount we already pay. I don’t mind paying for field trips, etc. But the need for fundraisers seems strange to me given we already pay them every month.
tktchiang

I hope you find a chinese school for your daughter. I ended up going to two growing up. One in Oakland and one in Fremont when my family moved to Union City. You’re a great parent to be concerned, but a prestigious school isn’t everything. I feel as long as your daughter has fun learning the language and you’re involved in her education, it’ll work out.
timat8asians

@tktchiang We got lucky, in that the Chinese school I picked is starting a new program next fall called “CSL” or Chinese for Second Language learners, essentially Chinese for those who Chinese isn’t spoken at home. I got her enrolled during the testing period (and lucky for her she didn’t have to take a test – much to her relief). It’s a program targeted at 4-7 year olds.
tktchiang

That’s great! I hope more schools will adopt this program because I know when I have kids I’m going to have to enroll them in a similar program. =)
jeffat8asians

@bubmomom Not all Asian American neighborhoods in the Bay area are like Cupertino and Palo Alto, and not all of us who live here are “Keep up with the Joneses” Tiger parents. Asian Americans are pretty diverse. I live across the valley from Cupertino in an Asian neighborhood. My kids and I were joking about the Asian kids in our area who hangs out at shopping centers, playing on ukuleles. I kid you not, they do that, and I don’t think it is because their tiger mothers are making them practice ukulele in public places.
Boogerhead

@timat8asians @tktchiang Just throw them in Taiwanese waters for the summers like Vampire Diaries’ Stefahn Salvatore getting sent to Poland every summer. I hate schlepping kids in the car. Kids don’t want to be amused in the backseat of a car on a regular basis.
Boogerhead

@timat8asians @ellebee11 some of them are going to deserve to have their neuroticism bite them in the ass.
Boogerhead

@timat8asians @ellebee11 omg, just home school them then!
tktchiang

@Boogerhead @timat8asians @tktchiang My mom actually wants to take my 3yo nephew with her to Taiwan for a year for him to learn, but of course the parents vetoed that idea.
http://tinabot.blogspot.com/ TinaTsai

I was going to say “My mom has a great Chinese School!” and then I realized “oh, but in Hacienda Heights ^_^, not up North”.

My best advice for a great education: Keep it real. ^_^

My best advice for Chinese language acquisition: Get her hooked on kung fu movies…that’s how I did it LOL ^O^
jeffat8asians

@timat8asians @bigWOWO Even now, my brother-in-law the real estate agent says those million dollar Cupertino homes are usually bought with 30% to 50% down. Lots of money floating around the valley, and much of it from overseas.
jeffat8asians

@timat8asians @ellebee11 Wow, that’s a lot. I paid that much for both of my sons at their school this past year.
norcaliftom

Is being raised an english speaker that offensive? Going back to China is always an option. Oh wait……China is mostly a third world, oppressive totalitarian state run by communist dictators.
norcaliftom

@GFP_Tagged I worked with someone like that at the state AG’s office before. Born and raised in San Francisco and spoke broken english because it wasn’t considered PC enough to address the problem. Like it or not if you can’t speak english in this world youre dead in the water folks. English is the international language whether that offends you or not.
http://tinabot.blogspot.com/ TinaTsai

@norcaliftom Can’t go “back” to China if we’re not from there. It’s a bad habit to speak to your fellow Americans as if they’re foreigners.
timat8asians

@norcaliftom My daughter has half her relatives living in the U.S. and half living in China. She’s also mixed race. She has Asian American relatives who speak only English, Asian relatives that speak only Chinese, and Caucasian relatives who speak only English. So it’s important for her to learn at least a little Chinese in addition to English. This might not be the case for you, but for many being able to communicate with your relatives is an important driver to maintaining a relationship with relatives.

I do a agree with @TinaTsai that suggesting people who are completely American “go back” is highly offensive.
http://tinabot.blogspot.com/ TinaTsai

@norcaliftom @GFP_Tagged Let’s take your metaphor about being “dead in the water” a little further. In this case, English is like an engine that pushes your little boat along, keeping it from being “dead in the water”. Clearly, being the most commonly spoken language in the US of A, the most powerful country in the world, it’s a pretty big engine.

But let’s consider the Chinese language engine.

Indisputable Fact #1. Chinese is the most commonly spoken language in the world. Indisputable Fact #2. Chinese is also the third most commonly spoken language in America behind English and Spanish.

Indisputable Fact #3. China is the major rising rival for US as a world superpower.

So which boat is more likely to to be dead in the water? The one with one powerful engine or the one with two?

Personally, I think the parent who makes sure their kid has a back up engine in case the other one breaks down is a good parent indeed.
http://tinabot.blogspot.com/ TinaTsai

@norcaliftom @GFP_Tagged

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers

woohoo! I speak/understand the top three! (although my spanish isn’t so awesome). Yay conquering languages…I’m so colonized >_<

Japanese is pretty up there, too. Taiwanese/Minan didn't do so bad either. Thinking of learning Turkish next so I can visit Gobekli Tepe. ^O^

My boat's multi-lingual powered. LOOK AT ME I'M ON A BOAT!
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