Tiger Mom-Style Strict Parenting is Leading to End of "the Asian Family"

My Malaysian Chinese girlfriend frequently speak of how pushy her parents can be.  Not only run errands for the house, force her to go to university to study what they dictate, and compel her to help out with the family business on a more permanent basis.  She tells me that she just want to get away from her family and move far far away to become independent  just like what I am currently doing by living and working in Malaysia.  While such complaints are common among Asians growing up in the West with its strong individualistic values, it is rather interesting to observe similar mentality in collectivist Asia.

And the conversation is particularly interesting considering the Chinese traditional holiday of Mid-Autumn Festival is being celebrated at this time of the year.  This Festival is rather like the Chinese version of Thanksgiving, when families get together to celebrate unity, eat some mooncakes, and enjoy their company during a week-long holiday (at least in China).  Surely enough, just like every other holiday, extra work is eroding the sense of community by taking away valuable time for those get-togethers, but perhaps seeing your family often leads to greater hatred for them than otherwise.

That certainly seems to be the case for my girlfriend and million of other youths growing up even in still family-oriented Asian societies.  Precisely because these societies emphasize so much on the need to maintain ties within extended families with hierarchical organization, enforced with indoctrination of filial piety as the central concept of group-oriented virtue, that the young people here in Asia, especially those with limited and often distorted views of the West as a "land of social/individual freedom," would exacerbate their otherwise-mellow rebelliousness during late teenage years and beyond.

In other words, over here in Asia, the anti-family feelings of the youth emerge not from lacking interaction with family, but from too much interaction with family.  The reason behind it has much to do how the Asian kids are brought up in the Asian family, with obedience to elders as the most important fact-of-life.  Such emphasis is most directly reflected in the so-called "tiger mom" phenomenon, where parents dictate the direction of a child's career and skill set by sheer force.  It is not surprising that the kids will grow up to hate their authoritarian family environment.

Yet, especially for Asian youth with more exposure to Western thoughts and lifestyles than their parents (certainly the case within the Malaysian Chinese community) the continued emphasis on filial piety, parental obedience, and forceful parenting may mean much more than raising a generation of parents-haters who dreams of moving to faraway lands where their parents can never control the directions of their lives or even contact them.  Asian family values as such may even dictate the very structure and socio-economic future of the same Asian societies.

Across the more developed and secular Asian societies, birth rate has been on a steady decline to below replacement level, and suicide rate has been climbing to the top spot for cause of death among the youth.  While people blame such on the competitive social environment that the kids grow up in, no ones has ever considered the idea that the strict parenting and forceful familial guidance may be the root cause of why these Asian societies are so cut-throat competitive in the first place.  The focus of families to shove their kids into higher social positions by pressure is changing the entire society...

To put in a more straightforward way, it can be said that the huge educational expenses that makes raising multiple kids so expensive in a developed country is largely made so expensive because competitive parents race to instill more academic drilling in their kids outside of regular school curriculum and thereby bid up the price of limited qualified educational resources. And when no equivalent returns are gained from those huge expenses and associated unrealistic expectations, it is no wonder that some choose to end their lives prematurely to escape the family pressures.

So perhaps, for all those strict Asian parents out there celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival without their (rebellious) kids by their side, it is perhaps time to blame not the kids for lacking filial piety, but take a look at their own actions as those kids were growing up to trace the reason why such filial piety is nonexistent.  A sincere review and revision of their own actions will no doubt not only help improve their own family unity, but also brighten the fate of the socially/demographically bleak countries of Asia in which they reside...