Tiger Parenting and Motivation
Aaron Li
I come from a near picture-perfect family. During my middle school years, everything seemed fine, at least to friends and relatives. We often hid our constant disagreements from outsiders. By we, I reference my dad and I. Mom was frequently out of the equation, which was understandable because of how heated the arguments were.
My dad was what some would call a tiger parent. Under the justification of helping me secure a better life, he pushed me to be something more. He concluded that being Asian was a limitation, one that could only be overcome by outworking my peers. Because that’s how he had done it. Through hard work and dedication, he had built himself a different future (he became a well-compensated engineer in the States after growing up in an impoverished village in post-Cultural Revolution China).
We had disagreements because he felt that I disrespected him when I believed I didn’t. His definition of disrespect was talking back, in other words, voicing an opinion contradictory to his. Some of my behavior can be chalked up to teenage rebelliousness, but oftentimes there was a valid criticism or question. Anyhow, my dad quashed any disobedience, so there weren’t many problems on the surface.
And that’s the key problem: I was fine only on the surface. He destroyed my curiosity or as Stanford calls it, intellectual vitality. The problem with tiger parenting is that it involves raising children with little to no freedom. In a world where your life is determined by your choices, this makes no sense. Childhood is the highlight of life, a time when youth covers for any mishaps that may occur in the process of discovering oneself. Once you mature, you lose this privilege. The core concept of tiger parenting is guiding children on the “right” path by getting them ahead of the rest of the populace earlier, often by instilling in them a method of success much before they even have a concept for why they exist.
In doing so, tiger parents rob their children of the opportunity for self-motivation and even worse, self-validation. My dad took over my life. I practiced advanced mathematics, learned to code, and practiced for the SSAT before I entered fourth grade. I was ahead of the competition. And that’s what it was: a rat race of mediocrity between the molds of overzealous parents.
Tiger parenting comes with trade-offs, but oftentimes parents are willing to make those. To rob the children of their childhood, individuality, curiosity, all to get them ahead. What tiger parents don’t realize is that they are the only motivation in their kids’ life. The motivation to succeed is not for the kid to build a better future for themselves, but to achieve the vision their parents have laid out for them (oftentimes this involves a lucrative profession).
I don’t mean to generalize for all people who have experienced this, but there is no world where this trade-off is worth it. When my parents later divorced, I became an absolute bum. I indulged in all the pleasures I had no access to before. I played games all day, which must’ve disgusted my dad. Fortunately, my friends and other support systems got me out of this pit, but this is not the case for everyone. I’m telling you the moment that the extrinsic motivation is gone, the child raised under its influence will have no will to continue. They will be lost for they cannot answer the simple question of what they have been working towards all along. In cases where this doesn’t happen within the first 20 years of their life, what about the next 20? Everyone is on this planet for a limited time, and eventually, tiger parents will leave their kids. This fall to despair is inevitable and catastrophic.
Sure, some kids turn out just fine. Fine in the sense that they work maybe as a lawyer, doctor, or engineer. They might even appreciate all the extrinsic motivation their parents gave them, and eventually redevelop all the abilities that were robbed from them. Regardless, regaining those abilities takes effort and circumstances that cannot be ascertained in every case. Furthermore, by removing their self-motivation and self-validation, tiger parents have inevitably set them behind. They have lost time, the most valuable asset in this world. They have lost their childhoods, far too much for this to ever be worth it. They have been given an almost death sentence to Asian mediocrity, living a robotic life of a maybe middle or upper-class American. They have experienced life in a predetermined course and have lost their sense of individuality. They are not living the American Dream: they are living in a shell, a life in Bitlife which their parents started.