Amy Chua is right about this form of parenting when you want to create a society that: 1) considers physical, mental, and emotional coercion as the only form of gaining compliance from a human being 2) considers outward success based on a standard of “winning” and “better than” as the only form of success 3) [...]
Family and Parents
I actually wrote this article in 2006 when I titled it, “An Asian Adult Child’s Guide to Reclaiming Your Own Mind”. In light of the recent “Chinese Mothers are Superior” article, I thought I’d share how ANY adult children who have been programmed for self-hatred can begin to reclaim themselves as human beings. If you [...]
Why Chinese Mothers are Superior, Wall street journal saturday edition. The marketing tactic that aims to generate publicity for Amy Chua’s book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Well, it sure worked! A ton of blog responses and over 2000 comments on WSJ at this point. OMG! This was even hotter than the “Motrin Mom” [...]
Sometimes I get reader emails about toxic families and emotional abuse related questions. Most of the time these are questions relating to ways of “breaking free” from those psychological chains. I think many of my site visitors can benefit from my answers, and to protect the askers’ identities I will only post my answers. I [...]
We’re big supporters of A Window Between Worlds, which uses art as a healing tool to help women and children in domestic violence situations. In recent years we’ve focused our giving specific to children’s programs – I believe that children are the key to breaking the chain of violence. I attended the “advocate huddle” last [...]
I receive many emails from Asian children (many of them grown adults, around my age, which is middle age) who have grown up in emotionally unhealthy environments. They usually write me after visiting this website and reading one of the articles on emotional manipulation and guilt. Here is my response (unedited) to someone asking for [...]
Ever since I reported on the high suicide rate of Asian American students, I’ve been thinking of writing something for them that addresses cultural conditioning.
Here is what I have observed from my own experience and coming from a first-generation asian immigrant family:
Many asian parents are amazing at using manipulation, guilt, and self-pity to get their kids to do whatever they want, or at least make them most miserable if the kids disobey. They aren’t necessarily being malicious on purpose, they just learned it from their parents.
I need to live the life I want to live, NOW, or I’ll die living the expectations of my parents, and be crappy job at it because I’d be miserable.
