Category: Asia360 News (Singapore)

There is no one perfect way to raise model children

I must admit I am terribly scared of leaving my one-year-old daughter alone with my wife. And I blame Yale Law School professor Amy Chua for my paranoia.

My little one was born barely three months after Chua horrified the Western world with her parenting memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”, which unapologetically presumed the superior efficacy of harsh, traditional Chinese parenting. In the bestselling book, Chua listed all the fun things she denied her daughters, which many in the West consider to be essential ingredients of childhood.

She also proudly mentioned subjecting her daughters to hours of academic and music drills with no water, dinner or bathroom breaks, and lashings of public shame — including calling her daughter “garbage” in front of many at a dinner party.

Harried mums around the Western world were soon threatening their children with making “Aunt Amy” adopt them if they did not listen to their mummies.

I neither share Chua’s Chinese parenting methods nor the Western world’s outraged reaction. I am an Indian. But what left me — a self-confessed cuddly, teddy-bear dad — worried about my daughter’s growing years was Chua’s recent remark that India’s tiger mums may outnumber China’s.

Hold on, I do not hear anything from the other room. Let me check what my wife and baby are doing.

All is fine; they are both sleeping. Phew!

Anyway, if Chua’s belief is accurate, it would mark a tectonic shift in the make-up of an Indian mother, eternally glorified by Bollywood films as a doting, protective and weepy mortal who makes a living out of begging her husband to forgive her child for all the mistakes that the little one may or may not have committed.

It has historically been the job of an Indian father to be the tough taskmaster, to instill discipline into children and make sure that they adhere to familial hierarchy and societal order.

The general belief in India is that ‘the arrangement’ has worked out just fine for Indian families.

But that does not stop most Indian mums from believing that every single Indian dad does cross the line of ‘healthy control’ at least once in his lifetime — especially when it comes to his daughter’s marriage or son’s career.

So this February, despite knowing me for about a decade, my wife started getting suspicious all over again about my parenting instincts when she saw a video of a Chinese businessman forcing his four-year-old to run nearly naked and do pushups in the New York snow. The boy’s crying pleas to stop did nothing to melt his dad’s heart.

“When the old eagle teaches its young, it takes the young eagles to the cliffside, beats them, and pushes them to teach them to use their wings,” the father told a Chinese newspaper.

As I said, I am not that kind of father. But whoever said escaping a stereotype is easy, especially if it gets reinforced by a global sensation — which, these days, seems to mean everything Chinese.

So there we are — an Indian household where both partners suspect the other one of being a tough Chinese parent beneath the brown skin. At times it gets to a point where our baby almost begins to get confused about her roots.

Putting my strange little world aside however, normally it is the confusion in parents’ minds that gives birth to most parenting-related debates — confusion about the best method to enable children to evolve into culturally well-groomed, financially self-reliant and socially well-respected adults.

In her book, Chua tries to distinguish Asian parenting from that in the West by highlighting the difference between the ‘degree of strictness’ that the two sets of parents make use of. She says that her Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day, or an hour at most. “For a Chinese mother,” she writes, “the first hour is the easy part. It’s the second and the third hours that get tough.”

Alan Paul, author of “Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing”, believes the approach stems from the historical structure of the Chinese society.

“It’s easy to understand a traditional Chinese drive for perfection in children: it is a huge nation with a long history of people thriving at the top and scraping by at the bottom without much in between.”

In India, it is science textbooks instead of instruments. Parents often ask their children to immerse themselves in equations and theories, especially around the times of numerous weekly and monthly tests. The pitch gets raised just prior to the big annual examination, leading to an embargo on sports and television.

But while Indian parents (generally) indeed go harder at their children than their Western counterparts, they do not tend to match up to the Tiger Mum or Eagle Dad stereotypes of Chinese parents.

Part of the reason behind the approach can be explained again in the historical context. India has a well-entrenched caste system, which for many centuries decided the future of every child born. So worrying too much about the child’s predetermined place in society as an adult did not make much sense.

“Let her (or him) be; it’s the age to enjoy” is one of the most common responses across India whenever questions are raised about less-than-perfect conduct of a young adult.

That particular aspect, interestingly, brings Indian parenting slightly closer to Western parenting attitudes than the Chinese model. Myth of a common Asian parenting style, anyone?

Clearly, most parenting styles, if not all, draw heavily from socio-historical context. The outward manifestations may not necessarily reflect the latent intent of the method.

In her book, Chua writes, “Many Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly. I think it’s a misunderstanding on both sides. All decent parents want to do what’s best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that.”

And therein lay the crux of parenting for me: Good advice can be found in various styles of parenting. No parenting style — neither Western nor Asian, if there is any such monolith after all — is perfect. And there is therefore no such thing as the perfect parent.

For now, my wife and I have made a pact. To begin with, we will trust each other with the baby. And then work towards coming up with our own style of parenting for the best of our child.

Would that be an Asian style of parenting? Who cares!   AR

For the young activist in Malaysia, idealism has acquired a sheen of pragmatism

For much of the month of April, student groups in Malaysia marched in the streets of Kuala Lumpur, demanding the abolition of the National Higher Education Fund (PTPTN), a student loan scheme that the protesters criticised as an exploitative, anti-poor commercial scheme. Instead of loans with high interest rates, they wanted free education.

But on April 28, when an estimated 100,000 people rallied in the same capital to demand electoral reforms under Bersih 3.0 (the Malay word literally means clean), the vibrant student movement was conspicuous by its absence. In contrast, 11 other cities in Malaysia and 85 cities across 33 countries worldwide registered protests on the day to show solidarity with the cause.

In sharp contrast to the 1960s, the students appear to now be more interested in rallying for pragmatic cost issues. Is student activism in Malaysia no longer driven by ideological struggles? Have the young and passionate passed on the banner to adults, to the middle-class men and women, the likes of whom stood firm for Bersih?

So, what has changed?

Nothing much, according to Dr Oh Ei Sun, academician and a former political secretary to the prime minister of Malaysia.

“I think that the ‘issue-based’ orientation in student activism nowadays does not represent a profound paradigm shift, but rather a clearer and more pragmatic manifestation of the more progressive students’ ideological struggle and concern for nation-building,” he told Asia360 News.

“Instead of fighting for some profoundly idealistic ideologies or some vague notion of nation-building, they are using, for example, a concrete issue such as abolition of PTPTN to highlight their ideological disagreement with the mainstream educational authorities — and also propose their alternative vision for nation-building efforts,” he added.

Choong Pui Yee, a research analyst at Singapore’s S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), agrees, and believes the new manifestation is due to an increase in the socio-political awareness and acumen of the present generation.

“Such evolving changes can be attributed to a stronger opposition coalition and an increasingly dynamic civil society movement in Malaysia. Students are now exposed to multiple views and ideas. The alternative media as the platform of information is another factor that contributed to this,” Choong told Asia360 News.

Dr Carmelo Ferlito, a fellow at the Malaysian think tank Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAS), seconds the role that the combination of technology and media, especially social media, has played in the evolution of the character of student movements in the country.

He goes to the extent of claiming that with the advent of technology, even the concept of nation itself has undergone considerable transformation.

Talking to Asia360 News he said: “The world today is simultaneously both bigger and small than a nation. Bigger: the highest reference points are looked for outside from the nation. Smaller: the real needs they consider urgent are more practical and less ideological. Hence, they don’t involve the concept of a nation.”

“But this utilisation of real-world issues is not anything new,” said Sun. “It has been put into practice in the 1960s and 70s — when the student movements had adopted the cause of alleviation of peasants’ poverty as a means of nation building.”

One of the prime examples of his argument was the Teluk Gong struggle in 1967. In their bid to obtain land for livelihood, a group of poor peasants cleared some forest land in the Teluk Gong region, tilled the land and built houses. Not much later, the government destroyed the crops, demolished the houses and arrested many of the peasants.

The University of Malaya Students Union (UMSU) and the University of Malaya Malay Language Society (PBMUM) denounced the government action and swiftly organised seminars and symposiums to support the peasants’ struggle.

Poverty soon became an important issue in the student struggle in the years after that. It was also the first time that students from different ethnic groups came together, encountering each other’s culture and sharing understanding. This was a great leap for a society highly sensitive to ethnic differences.

The argument is that even present day “real-world issues” like PTPTN are microcosms of the larger ideological, nation-building exercises — and they should be seen as such.

Sun agrees: “I think this [current] issue-orientation is a very healthy and organic direction for student activism in Malaysia, as it provides a sharper focus and a more pragmatic touch to their struggle.”

The only concern, says Ferlito, is that an intensely focused approach can also risk losing sight of the bigger picture. “The new approach of student activism can be both an opportunity and a risk for Malaysia. The opportunity is that a less ideological level can bring out a less ‘partisan’ politics, more oriented to the common good and open to learn from outside. The risk is that the political issues are minimised to practical things and the problem ‘to belong’ to something higher, like the Nation, is forgotten.”

Though Choong of RSIS acknowledges the challenge, she believes that the new manifestation of student activism has more pros than cons.

“Student activism in current days has inspired much more awareness and participation regardless of whether it is issue-based or not. Most importantly, the students are ready to engage and question. This will definitely help the nation to grow,” she said.

And all three of them believe that is what matters ultimately. Students may have ceded some space to the middle class in protests like Bersih but they will continue to remain relevant in the pursuit of a perfect nation.

Ideology just has a new approach now.    AR