The Last of the Tiger Parents. By Ryan Park

Meg sent this to the family last night. She asked us for our thoughts. I replied that the writer is still a tiger dad (in a way) but a more loving a supportive one, but a tiger dad nonetheless. I think it's the fear of the third generation decline. That said, this is very well said. So take it away, Mr Park...

 

 

In first grade, I arrived at my suburban elementary school as a sort of academic vaudeville trickster. My classmates stood speechless as I absorbed thick tomes on medieval history, wrote and presented research reports, and breezed through fifth-grade math problems like a bored teenager.\

 

My teachers anointed me a genius, but I knew the truth. My non-Asian friends hadn’t spent hours marching through the snow, reciting multiplication tables. They hadn’t stood at attention at the crack of dawn reading the newspaper aloud, with each stumble earning a stinging rebuke. Like a Navy SEAL thrown into a pool of raw conscripts, at 6, I had spent much of my conscious life training for this moment.

 

To my authoritarian father, all has gone according to plan. I excelled in school, attending Amherst College and Harvard Law School. I’ve embraced his conventional vision of success: I’m a lawyer. But like many second-generation immigrant overachievers, I’ve spent decades struggling with the paradox of my upbringing. Were the same childhood experiences that long evoked my resentment also responsible for my academic and professional achievements? And if so, was the trade-off between happiness and success worth it?

 

The way I and other Asian-Americans of my generation answer these questions could affect American society more broadly. My generation’s academic success has sparked a crisis of sorts in our country’s elite educational institutions. For example, despite having the highest poverty rate in New York City, Asian-Americans make up a large majority of students at the city’s premier public high schools — including 73 percent at the storied Stuyvesant — where admission is decided solely on the basis of a standardized test. Mayor Bill de Blasio has reacted by proposing to scrap the test to allow more black and Hispanic students to attend.

 

Meanwhile, Harvard faces a lawsuit claiming that the university artificially caps the number of Asian students by emphasizing non-merit-based factors in admissions, in the same way it deliberately designed its admissions policies in the 1920s to limit Jewish enrollment. Harvard itself has found that its share of incoming Asian students would more than double, to nearly half the class, if it considered only academic merit in deciding whom to admit.

 

Efforts to adjust these imbalances may or may not be warranted, but history also suggests they may naturally abate on their own. If the children of immigrants are often preternaturally driven, a phenomenon known as “second-generation advantage,” the grandchildren of immigrants usually experience “third-generation decline.” By the third generation, families absorb American cultural values, lose the feverish immigrant zeal to succeed and cease being, in any real sense, immigrants at all.

 

I’ve experienced this transition myself, as I’ve started a family of my own. When I became a parent, I felt the wonder and uncertainty that accompany the awesome responsibility of fatherhood. But I was absolutely sure of one thing: The childhood I devise for my two young daughters will look nothing like mine. They will feel valued and supported. They will know home as a place of joy and fun. They will never wonder whether their father’s love is conditioned on an unblemished report card.

 

I’ve assumed this means my daughters might someday bring home grades or make life choices that my father would have regarded as failures. If so, I embrace the decline.

 

During my constitutional law class, Akhil Amar — the only Asian-American professor I’ve ever had — asked for a show of hands: Whose parents immigrated to the United States after 1965? I joined all the other Asian students in raising my hand, along with a few white compatriots with hard-to-pronounce last names. As Mr. Amar explained, our American story was made possible by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, a groundbreaking statute that washed away a century of laws, like the frankly named Chinese Exclusion Act, aimed at making sure people like us never became Americans.

 

In the decades that followed, a large wave of Asian immigrants arrived in the United States. Like my parents, many of these new arrivals brought two cultural values that would carry their children far: a near-religious devotion to education as the key to social mobility and a belief that academic achievement depends mostly on effort rather than inborn ability. Many (though certainly not all, and probably less than half) also came armed with the belief that the best way to instill these values is through harsh methods that other Americans can regard as cruel.

The results have been striking. Today, Asian-Americans fill the nation’s top universities in staggering numbers, enter elite professions like medicine at incredible rates (nearly 20 percent of new doctors have Asian roots) and generally do better in school and make more money than any other demographic slice. Although overall trends mask vast diversity within our community, now 20 million strong, as a group we’ve broken the curve on standard metrics of success.

Because of pre-1965 immigration restrictions, the third-generation stories of most Asian-American families have yet to be written. Today, many second-generation Americans like me are at a parenting crossroads: Do we replicate the severe, controlling parenting styles many of us were raised with — methods that we often assume shaped our own success?

 

 

Amy Chua famously answered this question yes. In her memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” she explained that her fanatical parenting choices were driven by the desire to avoid “family decline.” But most second-generation Asian-Americans are not joining her. Rather, studies show that we’re largely abandoning traditional Asian parenting styles in favor of a modern, Western approach focused on developing open and warm relationships with our children.

My wife is also a second-generation Asian-American overachiever (she’s a doctor, the other immigrant-parent-approved profession), and together we’re trying to instill in our daughters the same grit and reverence for learning that our upbringings gave us, but in a happy and supportive home environment. (In this effort, we’ve followed the example of her parents, whose unfailing kindness is also common among Asian immigrants, proving it’s possible to have it both ways.) We’ve also adopted the relationship-driven mind-set common among young parents today but not among most immigrant parents, who emphasize discipline. For example, before my oldest daughter was on an early-morning school schedule, I freely indulged her disregard for bedtime on a condition: The night was firmly earmarked for learning. We’d sometimes stay up past midnight, lying on our stomachs with feet in the air, huddled over a dry-erase board and a bowl of popcorn, practicing phonics or learning about sea creatures. My own father, by contrast, strictly policed bedtime, angrily shutting down my attempts to hide under the sheets with a book and a flashlight.

 

Studies on second-generation parenting also show that many of us are striving to cultivate individuality and autonomy in our children in a way that we feel was missing from our own childhoods. As the respondent in one study explained: “As a young adult I really struggled with what I wanted to do. I was always told that I would be a doctor and so I never had a chance to really look outside of that and if I did, it wasn’t nurtured at all.” With her own children, she said, “we try to expose them to everything under the sun and then home in on the things that excite them, what they like.”

The traditional Asian parenting model is, in theory at least, premised on imposing pain now to reap meritocratic rewards later. For much of my life, I accepted this premise and assumed there must be a trade-off between inculcating academic success and happiness. But as I’ve learned since becoming a parent, the research shows that children tend to do best, across the board, when parents command loving respect, not fearful obedience — when they are both strict and supportive, directive and kindhearted. By contrast, children subjected to hostile “tiger” parenting methods are more likely to be depressed, anxious and insecure. And while many tiger cubs run the gantlet and emerge as academic gladiators, on average, children subjected to high-pressure parenting actually tend to do worse in school. In short, a firm hand works best when paired with a warm embrace. This is the approach I’ve tried to take with my daughters.

Like all parents, however, my failures stack up alongside my successes. And I know that the decision to abandon immigrant parenting principles could backfire. The striving immigrant mind-set, however severe, can produce results. Every time I snuggle my daughters as they back away from a challenge — when my own father would have screamed and spit and spanked until I prevailed — I wonder if I’m failing them in a very different way than he did me.

 

But I’m temperamentally unable to mimic my father’s succeed-at-all-costs immigrant mind-set, an instinct I share with most of my generation. And maybe that marks our immigrant parents’ ultimate triumph: We have become American. As part of the American parenting mainstream, I aim to raise children who are happy, confident and kind — and not necessarily as driven, dutiful and successful as the model Asian child. If that means the next generation will have fewer virtuoso violinists and neurosurgeons, well, I still embrace the decline.

 

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At the heart of Argentine crisis, Messi. By Jonathan Wilson

The FIFA World Cup throws up drama that only football can. From a corrupt governing body to nobodies who rise to the ocassion and of course stars who don't. This is an insightful piece of writing from The Guardian.

 

He did not cause the defensive collapse against Croatia but the team’s dependence on Lionel Messi makes them predictable and when his country looked to him, he wasn’t there

It was in 1913 that Racing became the first non-Anglo side to win the Argentinian league title. For much of the century that has followed, Argentinian football has defined itself in opposition to the English, distancing itself from its British heritage. And yet, under pressure, in their frenzied desperation on Thursday, Argentina resembled nobody so much as England.

This was shambolic. Too many players tried to do too much themselves. There was altogether too much running, too much frenzy, too many fouls conceded as they desperately tried to regain possession, too little thought. By the end, as Ivan Rakitic casually rolled in a sarcastic third for Croatia, Argentina were gone, any semblance of defensive structure blown to the winds.
Had this been the final group game, the loss of discipline might have been explicable. But it was not. A 1-0 defeat Argentina could, plausibly, have got away with. Even 2-0 was just about rescuable. But now they are looking at probably having to put at least three past Nigeria in their final game, while hoping the other result goes their way. Perhaps Lionel Messi has one last miracle in him, but this would be his greatest yet.

Messi himself was barely involved. He touched the ball only 49 times, and only six times in the final quarter hour. When his country looked to him, he simply wasn’t there. It’s ludicrous, of course, that one player should be under such pressure, that everything should be about him, particularly when it was his display in Ecuador that got Argentina to Russia, particularly in a nation with such a proud football history as Argentina, with so many other great talents in their squad, but it’s increasingly coming to seem that the Messi dependence that has benighted Argentina for so long can be solved in only one way.

Paulo Dybala hit upon the truth in an interview earlier in the year: Messi is simply too good. Dybala said he found him almost impossible to play with because the temptation is always simply to give him the ball. At club levels players adapt; at national level, where there is less time and a greater range of talent in the squad, it is far more difficult. Everything goes through him and that makes Argentina predictable and susceptible to being frustrated by sides that pack the centre.

Jorge Sampaoli had spoken before the tournament of the 2‑3‑3-2 he intended to use, playing Messi behind a centre-forward but with another playmaker in midfield. That – essentially a 4-4-1-1 with a midfield diamond but very attacking full‑backs – was seen only briefly in the Iceland game, after Éver Banega had replaced Lucas Biglia. In the four days since, it disappeared altogether.
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Messi had told Sampaoli at an asado (barbecue) in March that he felt a 3-4-3, such as he played in for Luis Enrique at Barcelona at the end of 2016-17, didn’t work for him because it naturally drew defenders into the inside-right zone he likes to attack. Sampaoli had agreed but against Croatia he returned to that original plan. In the first half, Messi was proved right.
But at least then there was a structure. By the end, there was nothing: just players, a pitch that had become a theatre of torment, and an opposition who, also rather less than the sum of their parts, couldn’t believe their luck.
Hindsight offers hints of the devastation to come. At the anthems, Messi, staring at the ground, kept rubbing his face with his hand. He had not attended a Father’s Day asado at the team camp, staying in his room, fretting. He may still be around in Qatar in four years but he will turn 35 in June 2022. He will not be the same player. If he does, implausibly, achieve success there, it will not be as the greatest player in the world putting the final seal on his legacy but as some gnarled veteran completing one last job and achieving at the very end some redemption for an international career that has been an enormous disappointment. It’s an appealing narrative but not the one he or Argentina wanted.
Just before the second half began, Sampaoli took his place on the bench and looked almost ill, his face grey and sheened with sweat. The sense then was that he knew his side were on the brink. By the end, his jacket was off and he was reduced to waving his heavily tattooed arms in a vague lifting gesture, helpless to check the anarchy unfolding in front of him. For the defensive collapse, Messi is not at fault.
Sampaoli will be held responsible and, assuming the Argentinian Football Association can find the money to pay his compensation, he will almost certainly be dismissed. But the blame goes far deeper and begins far earlier. Sampaoli was the third coach Argentina had used in qualifying. His football, predicated on a high line and a ferocious press, was not a natural fit for Argentina’s fleet of lumbering defenders and he never had the time to find a solution. But ripping up the blueprint he had unveiled only a couple of weeks ago after one game smacked of panic. He is not the first Argentina coach to be chewed up by the chaos that surrounds the job, and he will not be the last.

But he may be the last to lead Messi at a World Cup, and that is the great sadness of their defeat. Messi remains at the absolute summit of the pantheon but he deserved a better farewell from the World Cup than this strange homage to Argentinian football’s English roots.

A right mindset

Serendipity. I find that the universe reaches out to me whenever I need it. A kind of cosmic helping hand. Flying off to KL this week, one though occupied my mind. Your well-being. I know you are preparing for your upcoming test and having to cope in person with high achieving relatives. 

That’s how the world flows. I shared with you how I cope. I figured if things happening around me is relevant or not. I only took heed of what is pertinent. That way, the ambient “noise”, even if it is in my face, didn’t faze me. I just concentrated on what’s relevant for me. However, having said that, I felt my perspective was somehow inadequate for you. You are made differently and you care about stuff differently too.

Then serendipity. At the airport bookshop, an old management classic caught my eye. It’s about mindset.

Since the dawn of time, people have thought differently, acted differently, and fared differently from each other. It was guaranteed that someone would ask the question of why people differed, why some people are smarter or more moral – and whether there was something that made them permanently different. Experts lined up on both sides. Some claimed that there was a strong physical basis for these differences, making them unavoidable and unalterable. Through the ages these alleged physical differences have included bumps on the skull (phrenology), the size and shape of the skull (craniology), and, today, genes.

Others pointed to the strong differences in people’s backgrounds, experiences, training, or ways of learning. It may surprise you to know that a big champion of this view was Alfred Binet, the inventor of the IQ test. Wasn’t the IQ test meant to summarize children’s unchangeable intelligence? In fact, no. Binet, a Frenchman working in Paris in the early 20th century, designed this test to identify children who were not profiting from the Paris public schools, so that new educational programs could be designed to get them back on track. Without denying individual differences in children’s intellects, he believed that education and practice could bring about fundamental changes in intelligence. Here is a quote from one of his major books, Modern Ideas About Children, in which he summarizes his work with hundreds of children with learning difficulties: “A few modern philosopher’s assert that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism.... With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.”

Who’s right? Today most experts agree that it’s not either/or. It’s not nature or nurture, genes or environment. From conception on, there’s a constant give and take between the two. In fact, as Gilbert Gottlieb, an eminent neuroscientist put it, not only do genes and environment cooperate as we develop, but genes require input from the environment to work properly.

At the same time, scientists are learning that people have more capacity for life-long learning and brain development than they ever thought. Of course, each person has a unique genetic endowment. People may start with different temperaments and different aptitudes, but it is clear that experience, training, and personal effort take them the rest of the way. Robert Sternberg, the present-day guru of intelligence writes that the major factor in whether people achieve expertise “is not some fixed prior ability, but purposeful engagement.” Or, as his forerunner, Binet, recognized, it’s not always the people who start out the smartest who end up the smartest. 

Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character, well then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics…I’ve seen so many people with this one consuming goal of proving themselves—in the classroom, in their careers, and in their relationships. Every situation calls for a confirmation of their intelligence, personality, or character. Every situation is evaluated: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser? But doesn’t our society value intelligence, personality and character? Isn’t it normal to want these traits? Yes, but...

There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way—in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments – everyone can change and grow through application and experience.

Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable), that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training. Did you know that Darwin and Tolstoy were considered ordinary children? That Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers of all time, was completely uncoordinated and graceless as a child? That the photographer Cindy Sherman, who has been on virtually every list of the most important artists of the 20th century, failed her first photography course? That Geraldine Page, one of our greatest actresses, was advised to give it up for lack of talent?

You can see how the belief that cherished qualities can be developed creates a passion for learning. Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.

I see how hard you are working now. I know that this even stresses you somewhat. I really applaud the effort you are putting in to prepare for the test. As you do so, my wish for you is not so much to keep up your grades, or to prove to your family and friends that you are a good student. Rather, I wish for you to do so because you know and want to develop your knowledge in maths, in chemistry, in economics. A mindset to grow.

Spain and Portugal Play a Draw for the Ages, Starring a Player for All Time By Rory Smith

All Spain’s fans could do, after it was over, was applaud. There was no sense wallowing in disappointment, worrying about what it all might mean. Spain had victory snatched away at the last moment, denied a cathartic moment by its nearest neighbor, and yet there was no bitterness, no sorrow: only admiration, and awe. Sometimes, it is not the winning, but the taking part.

There surely must have been a better World Cup group game in the past than the compelling draw between Spain and Portugal on Friday. There has to have been one played at a higher standard, one richer in drama and more absorbing. And wherever, and whenever, that game was played, it must have been truly remarkable.

Because topping what occurred on Friday is no simple task. Twice, Portugal led. Twice, Spain recovered, before Nacho Fernández scored the sort of goal that is supposed to be beyond the skill of a stand-in right back. The goal gave Spain the lead for the first time in the match and put Fernando Hierro, the Spanish coach, on course for an immense victory only one game, and two days, into his job. And then Cristiano Ronaldo, yet again, intervened.

If Spain’s preparations for this game have been troubled — firing its previous coach, Julen Lopetegui, on the eve of the tournament for failing to disclose that he was about to take charge at Real Madrid — then Portugal’s have scarcely been better.

Several members of the team, which won the European championship in 2016, are on the verge of rescinding their club contracts, at Lisbon’s Sporting C.P., because of intimidation by fans and a breakdown in their relationship with the club’s president.

On Friday morning, meanwhile, only a few hours before the game, it emerged in Spanish news media reports that Ronaldo himself had agreed to pay the Spanish authorities $21.8 million in unpaid taxes. He has also been given a two-year suspended jail sentence, the papers said. It would be hard to believe that these developments did not faze him as the game approached.

Still, it was Ronaldo who gave Portugal the lead, winning and converting a penalty after just four minutes of play. And it was Ronaldo who restored the lead, his shot squirming under David De Gea, the Spanish goalkeeper, as the first half drew to a close. And it was Ronaldo who, with just a few minutes remaining in the second half, lined up a free kick a little outside the Spanish penalty area with Portugal now trailing, 3-2.

He had taken 44 free kicks in previous World Cups. He had scored on none of them. Still, you know what they say: the 45th time’s a charm.

It is true that Ronaldo, at 33, is not the player he was. He is still perfectly sculpted, of course, a Men’s Health magazine cover made flesh, but the electric pace has fizzled a little; he does not cover quite as much ground (only one player, the Portuguese defender José Fonte, ran less than Ronaldo in a first half in which one of them scored twice).

But it is equally true to say that Ronaldo, even in his twilight, shines brighter than almost any player with whom he comes into contact. He has not so much faded as a player as evolved into something different. It is misleading to suggest that he has transformed into a striker, a penalty- area predator, because he is not really restricted by such mortal concepts as geography.

Instead, he has attained a level of such devastating efficiency that he now does not really require something so mundane as the ball. He does not need to be involved. He looks, often, like he is doing nothing, or something quite close to it — as if he is a mere passenger. It is an illusion. He is always in the cockpit.

Isco, his Real Madrid teammate, was the dominant player on the field here, the one who was most involved, who prompted and probed and prodded, and he was wearing a Spain jersey. Ronaldo has moved beyond needing to dictate games. He concerns himself only with defining them.

His free kick, needless to say, curled artfully, effortlessly, past De Gea and into the corner of Spain’s goal, as Ronaldo — despite all historical evidence to the contrary — must have known it would.

Portugal, which is now best thought of as a nation established in 1128 so that it might one day produce Cristiano Ronaldo, would have its draw. More important, the 2018 World Cup had its spark. The afterglow of a game like this can last for a couple of weeks, at least; on this stage, it can resonate around the world.

Spain would have been forgiven for feeling like a victim. It had been the better team in this game, had more of the ball, created more opportunities, played the slicker, smoother soccer.

It had looked every inch a contender for a World Cup title and nothing like a side still reeling from Lopetegui’s departure, shaken to its core by a dispute between its players and their ultimate bosses at the country’s federation, having to adjust to life under a new coach who, until now, had only managed one second-division team.

That Spain’s players did not let all this deter them on Friday only served to emphasize the scale of Ronaldo’s performance and the overall quality of the match.

And when the final whistle blew, the stadium stood: not just the clusters of Portuguese fans, not just the neutrals and the Russians, but the Spanish fans, too, in those blood-red jerseys. They applauded their own team, of course; there was enough encouragement there to see the bigger picture, to believe that the tumult of the last few days may not be fatal to their hopes.

But when Spain’s players had left the field, and Portugal’s stood in the center circle, the Spanish fans remained standing, and they kept clapping, as every single Portuguese player sought out Ronaldo, to clasp his hand, to ruffle his hair, as though just to touch him was to brush against something holy.

They do not mind that he attracts — demands, really — all of the attention. They do not mind being in the supporting cast, just as those Spanish fans did not mind providing the audience for the three acts of his one-man show. Sometimes, it is a pleasure simply to be there; sometimes, it is a pleasure just to sit back and watch. And at the end, sometimes there is nothing to do but applaud.

■ Here’s how it happened:

Full Time: Spain 3, Ronaldo 3

Ronaldo has produced one of the most remarkable individual performances you could possibly hope to see, and illuminated what will take some beating as the best game of the tournament. Portugal hasn’t been discussed much as a contender for the World Cup, despite being European champion. This may have been an oversight.