Back in 2017, educator and author, Dr. Cornelius Grove, sent me his book about East Asian parents back in 2017 to review, which I did, but only recently began to understand how the Tiger Mom form of parenting is actually best for training children with poor work ethic and for relieving parental anxiety and stress when a child enter Middle and High School years.
Essentially, his book “The Drive to Learn: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Raising Students Who Excel” talks about how Eastern Asian parents do a better job at parenting children. In short, in this book delves into the deep cultural reasons why our children’s learning in school is consistently below others. (Read more about the author at TheDriveToLearn.info)
Now that I am deep into Western form of parenting and can now appreciate the hard lessons in the book, I am comfortable advising new parents to consider the East Asian form of parenting and to introduce the models and styles as early as possible in order to make life easier, academically, later.
This suggestion is true becuase you have no clue what kind of temperment your baby will develop over time so in case you do not get a natural hard worker or go-getter, at least you can supplement and hard wire a more care-free, relaxed, non-challant child’s brain to know to do what needs to be done to succeed academically, at least!
Here is an excerpt from my review from a few years back if you would like to revisit it:
Because America focuses on the individual and lays the burden to educate its school children squarely on shoulders of school systems and teachers may be the cause for pervasive mediocrity among its students compared to other industrialized nations.
So says social scientist and researcher Cornelius Grove which I received this Summer complimentary in exchange for an honest review.
It took me quite some time to get through it because of life’s interruptions but also because it is tremendously densely packed with information, data, anecdotes and references that I wanted to make sure I took a comprehensive approach to digesting all of its contents before writing this review. Also, I am very interested in education and the process of raising quality children. The Sociology of child-raising is a fascinating topic to me.
Admittedly, from reading the front and back cover, I expected the book to a “bashfest” of the American education system and American children interwoven through passages levying laudatory praise of East Asian schools and kids.
It was not that really. Moreso, Grove examines various aspects of learning in the two cultures in an attempt to dissect what makes them so different.
America is an individualized society while China and Japan are Communitarian. While America focuses on the build up of the individual and self, East Asian cultures strive to develop a sense of being part of a larger community. READ MORE
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