The Asian View of Excellence is Often Narrow and Harmful
Let me tell you a little bit about how Asian parents raise their kids.
Before I begin, I should clarify that generalizations obviously have their limits—every family and every person is unique. However, generalizations can be useful to highlight important cultural differences, and I believe what I’m about to describe is one of them. If your parents are Asian, especially East Asian, you probably already know what I’m about to say.
I recently read an article describing how strict Asian parenting, aimed at academic success, harms the parent-child relationship. The author refers to this type of parenting as “tiger parenting,” which is named after Amy Chua’s book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
The author states,
Tiger parents fixate on their children attaining high levels of success in academic and extracurricular domains, often at the sacrifice of the emotional bond between parent and child. Families of East Asian descent have a particular reputation for this kind of parenting, where education is culturally venerated as a means of social mobility, though it is not theirs exclusively. In many immigrant families, yearning for financial stability further amplifies the pressure on children. Many of my childhood friends and university classmates grew up under such strict regimes.
As a person of East Asian descent, I can verify that this is absolutely true. Asian parents highly value education because they see it as a means to be successful.
What does success mean? Having a good job.
What’s a good job? One that pays a lot and is prestigious.
To elaborate, they want you to be rich, but they don’t want you to do anything shady to make that money. So no drug dealing, no criminal activity, nothing that will bring shame to the family. To be clear, this means they pressure their kids to do what they believe to be prestigious and profitable—e.g., becoming a doctor or an engineer. There is, in essence, a hierarchy of professions.
Given the end goal of success, it’s common for Asian parents to be strict because they believe they need to exercise control over their children’s lives for those lives to go as desired. The fundamental assumption is that kids will not become excellent on their own. Excellence has to be achieved. This means they have to force their children to do well in school and force them to do extracurricular activities. (The latter not only helps you get into a good college but also is a form of excellence.) To that end, Asian parents often force their kids to learn a musical instrument. Actually, in my case, I had to learn two: piano and violin. (If you didn’t know, these are very popular instruments that Asian parents force their children to learn. I’ve never met an Asian person who was forced to learn the electric guitar.)
As a result of this strict parenting style, Asian students tend to do well academically. According to this article, “Asian American students obtain higher grades, perform better on standardized tests, and are more likely to finish high school and attend elite colleges than their peers of all other racial backgrounds, regardless of socioeconomic status.” An illuminating example of Asian academic success is this: MIT’s 2024 freshman class is 47% Asian American, even though Asians make up only 7% of the American population.
So the benefits of strict parenting are clear; however, it comes at an emotional cost—namely, it weakens the parent-child relationship. In my experience, it’s common for Asian children not to be close to their parents as a result of the pressure they received growing up.
One person wrote this comment in response to the tiger parenting article:
I grew up with (Chinese) tiger parents and nothing I ever did was good enough for them. If I had walked on water they would say I could not swim. I disobeyed their instructions to become a doctor and majored in the humanities instead. I haven’t spoken with my parents now in over 20 years and I never will again.
My life is so much less toxic without them and their constant, unending criticism about how I should be doing better no matter how well I have done (which, BTW, was a means for them to continually express how they did better). Nothing would ever be good enough in their eyes.
Now, I want to be clear here. Asian parents obviously love their children and want what’s best for them. Moreover, it’s good to push your kids to do things that will enrich their lives. Music is beautiful, and being able to play music is a wonderful skill. But what the article and the commentator have pointed out is that they push their children too hard. Indeed, they push them so hard academically that they end up pushing them away emotionally.
The Natural Diversity of Self-Development
In addition to this problem, there’s one that I want to highlight because it doesn’t get enough attention. My main criticism is that the Asian view of excellence is too narrow, and that this, plus the strict parenting style, often frustrates the attainment of an important good—namely, the development of one’s potential in accordance with one’s values. I call this good “self-development.”
I mentioned earlier that I’ve never met an Asian person who was forced to play the electric guitar. As far as I can tell, Asian parents don’t like that instrument, and so they don’t force their children to learn it. My experience tells me that they much prefer instruments that are typically found in an orchestra.
Regarding careers, Asian parents want their kids to be doctors, lawyers, and engineers, not artists, school teachers, and carpenters. They definitely don’t want their kids to join the circus, even though one could be an excellent clown.
In other words, they don’t believe or care that there are many ways to be excellent, so they’ll push their kids away from all those other activities. This results in the restriction of the development of the natural diversity of human capacity.
To elaborate, under conditions of freedom, different people will naturally choose to do different things with their lives. This, I think, follows from a couple of observations. First, different people are talented in different ways, and second, different people have different life experiences. These two factors combined suggest that people will choose different occupations, careers, and professions if they’re allowed to.
Tiger parenting pushes against this natural diversity. Metaphorically speaking, it forces all the differently shaped pegs into the round hole. It doesn’t matter if you were meant to dance. It doesn’t matter if you were meant to paint. To the Asian parent, it’s not about pursuing your passion or finding your calling. Rather, it’s about money and prestige, and being a dancer or painter is unlikely to bring you those things.
When I was teaching ESL in China, I remember asking one of my students what he wanted to do as a career, and he said he wanted to design cars. But since his parents wanted him to go into finance, that’s what he was doing. I don’t remember how many examples like this I’ve encountered in my life, but I know there are many.
These situations are tragic because pursuing your passion is part of a full human life. Here’s an excerpt from a paper I wrote in 2017:
The declaration of the value of self-development is found in the works of many scholars, including Wilhelm von Humboldt, John Stuart Mill, Joseph Raz, Martha Nussbaum, and Karl Marx. Von Humboldt, who predates Mill and whose work heavily influenced On Liberty, states very clearly that “The true end of man... is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole” (p. 10). Mill expresses a similar sentiment when he says that developing oneself is “one of the leading essentials of well-being” (p. 47). Raz believes that a successful life includes, among other things, achievement and the exercise of talents (p. 306). One of Nussbaum’s ten central capabilities necessary for a life of human dignity is senses, imagination, and thought, which is defined as “[b]eing able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth” (p. 33). And finally, Marx states that human beings’ life-activity is productive labor, a concept that entails the free development of their physical and mental energy (p. 66–125), or as Jon Elster puts it, “the full and free actualization and externalization of the powers and the abilities of the individual” (p. 101).
The claim that self-development is an important good can also be found in the psychological literature, and the most famous example may be found in the works of Abraham Maslow. Maslow proposed the concept of self-actualization, which is a need that human beings have to do what they are fitted for. According to him, “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be” (p. 382). Other less famous (but more recent) psychologists include Carol Ryff and Alan Waterman, both of whom conduct eudaimonic well-being research. According to the former, a fundamental component of well-being is personal growth, which includes the development of one’s potentials. The latter has a similar conception in his theory of well-being, which he refers to as the development of one’s best potentials.
Given that self-development is such an important good, and given that Asian parents commonly frustrate this good, it follows that Asian parents often cause great harm to their kids in this way.
A few clarifications are in order.
First, one could argue that there’s value in developing your capacities in a way that you don’t care about or want. Maybe you think it’s good for you to learn a skill even if you were forced to learn it. I’m sympathetic to this position; however, this type of self-development would be a superficial version of true self-development, the latter of which is characterized by developing your potential in a way that you value.
Second, the extent of the harm of the frustration of self-development will vary depending on the severity of the strictness of the parenting. So any assessment of harm must be done on a case-by-case basis.
And third, it’s understandable why Asian parents want their children to be excellent. In fact, every good parent wants their kids to succeed, so I believe it comes from a good place. In fact, I think it’s a type of love.
Michael Sandel makes a distinction between accepting love and transforming love. The former refers to accepting your kid no matter what, while the latter refers to developing your kid’s excellence. He believes that parents should have a good balance of the two, and that it can be harmful if they put too much emphasis on one or the other. What tiger parents are doing is putting too much emphasis on transforming love.
To be clear, I don’t want people to walk away from this article thinking that Asian parents are terrible. I’m not saying that. Rather, I’m saying that their strict parenting style, informed by their well-meaning but narrow view of excellence, often harms their children because it often frustrates the good of self-development.