SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Raising strong children

I am reading an interesting book, Willpower: Rediscovering the greatest human strength, and will review it soon. But I thought you might be interested in an excerpt from the book about the self-esteem movement. After explaining that the current emphasis on children’s self esteem has led to a broad rise in narcissism, the authors make the point that there is an exception to this trend among young Asian-Americans. This excerpt (pp. 194-95) talks about what happens when Asian parents are more interested in instilling discipline and promoting self-control than bolstering their children’s self esteem.

“Chinese parents and preschools pressure children quite early in life to become toilet trained and acquire other basic forms of impulse control. By one estimate, two-year-old Chinese children are expected to have levels of control that correspond roughly to what American children reach at age three or four.

“A clear difference between Chinese and American toddlers emerges when they’re asked to override their natural impulses. In one test, for instance, the toddlers are shown a series of pictures and instructed to say ‘day’ whenever they see the moon, and ‘night’ whenever they see the sun. In other tests, the toddlers try to restrain themselves to a whisper when they’re excited, and play a  version of Simon Says in which they’re supposed to obey one kind of command but ignore another kind. The Chinese four-year-olds generally perform better on these tests than Americans of the same age. The Chinese toddlers’ superior self-control might be due in part to genes. There’s evidence that the genetic factors associated with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) are much rarer in Chinese children than in American children. But the cultural traditions in China and other Asian countries undoubtedly play an important role in instilling self-discipline, and those traditions in Asian-American homes have contributed to the children’s low levels of narcissism as well as their later successes. Asian-Americans make up only 4 percent of the U.S. population but account for a quarter of the student body at elite universities like Stanford, Columbia, and Cornell. They’re more likely to get a college degree than any other ethnic group, and they go on to earn salaries that are 25 percent above the American norm.

“Their success has led to the popular notion that Asians are more intelligent than Americans and Europeans, but that’s not how James Flynn explains their achievements. After carefully reviewing IQ studies, Flynn concludes that the scores of Chinese-American and Japanese-American people are very similar to whites of European descent. If anything, the Asian-Americans’ IQ is slightly lower, on average, although they do show up more at both the upper and lower extremes. The big difference is that they make better use of their intelligence. People working in what Flynn calls elite professions, like physicians, scientists, and accountants, generally have an IQ above a certain threshold. For white Americans, that threshold is an IQ of 110, but Chinese-Americans manage to get the same elite jobs with an IQ of only 103. Moreover, among the people above each threshold, Chinese-Americans have higher rates of actually getting into those jobs, meaning that a Chinese-American with an IQ above 103 is more likely to get an elite job than an American with an IQ above 110. The pattern is similar for Japanese-Americans. But virtue of self-control - hard work, diligence, steadiness, reliability - the children of immigrants from East Asia can do as well as Americans with higher IQs.”