Embracing the decline

Did you know that there are now more than 20 million Asian Americans? Ryan Park is a lawyer writing in the New York Times,

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?

... 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.

...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.

Read more here.