The Stressful Lives of American High Schoolers

Sad news in New York City, where a student at the prestigious Dalton School leapt to his death, in an act that was witnessed by a group of fourth-graders. While investigators are initially ruling this as a suicide, the details are still unknown at this time, though one student described the victim as being depressed of late. There's a member of our church who ministers to students in that school though FOCUS, and I'm sure he would covet our prayers especially at this time.

I think once you leave that period of your life, it's easy to take for granted just how stressful that life can be. Those years are fraught with crisis around parents, friendships, romantic relationships, and not least the pressure (as I'm sure there was at Dalton) to be a high achiever so you can get into a top-notch university. The pressure can be unbearable. So it perplexes me when there are suggestions that it's actually a good thing to ratchet that pressure up twenty or thirty times over.

In 2005, Dr. Soo Kim Abboud and Jane Kim wrote a book titled "Top of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achievers--and How You Can Too". Not ashamed to prejudge this book I never read in its entirety, I immediately hated the book simply on principle. Besides unhelpfully painting Asian success with a broad brush, it typecast Asian parenting, erroneously established incorrect preconceptions about the definition of "success" and shared some "best practices" which I'd frankly deem developmentally and emotionally dangerous. An article in the New York Times made it evident that the authors were big believers in their formula success, all which can be yours for $13.

Are some practices, such as giving tough love, bribing your kids to read and study and with money and candy or loading them up with supplemental lessons, effective? It could be, but the question always emerges: What exactly is the end goal, academic achievement or spiritual excellence (which doesn't mean the kid should be failing classes)? And what are the unintended consequences of achieving that goal? Emotional scarring? Family dysfunctionality? Spiritual desolation? Self-loathing?

To illustrate, I close with an Amazon.com review of the book from a username "Herstory":

I was raised in a very traditional Chinese family. Oh yes, I even now attend an Ivy League school. One slight problem, my father used to terrify me by yelling at me and calling me "stupid", "lazy", and "useless" whenever I got a math problem wrong. This was during trigonometry lessons when I was in 5th grade.

So, raise your kids the asian way, and they'll turn out to be valedictorians (like I was), Ivy-league students (like I am), and on anti-depressant medication (like I am).

They'll also refuse to speak to you after they leave for college. I have not spoken to my father for about 5 years. Not a word.

Oh yeah, the asian parenting also turned me into a raging feminist whose mission is out to punish every single father who tells his straight-A daughter that she is stupid, fat or ugly simply because she didn't know the graph of cosine.

Isn't that terrible? How in the world could someone Asian not know the graph for cosine?