As the medical director for Child and Youth Mental Health community programs in Vancouver, Dr. Kang has witnessed firsthand the consequences of parental pressure: anxiety disorders, high stress levels, suicides, and addictions. As the mother of three children and as the daughter of immigrant parents who struggled to give their children the “best” in life—her mother could not read and her father taught her math while they drove around in his taxi—Dr. Kang argues that often the simplest “benefits” we give our children are the most valuable. By trusting our deepest intuitions about what is best for our kids, we will in turn allow them to develop key dolphin traits to enable them to thrive in an increasingly complex world: adaptability, community-mindedness, creativity, and critical thinking.
Life is a journey through ever-changing waters, and dolphin parents know that the most valuable help we can give our children is to assist them in developing their own inner compass. Combining irrefutable science with unforgettable real-life stories, The Dolphin Parent walks readers through Dr. Kang’s four-part method for cultivating self-motivation. The book makes a powerful case that we are not forced to choose between being permissive or controlling. The third option—the option that will prepare our kids for success in a future that will require adaptability—is the dolphin way.
CHAPTER 1
THE REIGN OF THE TIGER
In my practice, I have the honor of being invited into the very unique personal lives of the children and families I work with. Sometimes, that invitation doesn’t come directly from patients themselves. One morning, my colleague asked me to meet him at an address not far from my house. The police were there. Working with the police is common in a child and youth practice, but this case was unusual. I’d been asked to assess a fourteen-year-old boy named Albert, who had been taken into custody after locking a woman in her own basement. It wasn’t any woman. It was his mother. Albert had locked her up for an entire weekend. His mother was safe, and she had had access to food and a bathroom. However, when her husband, who was calling from overseas, couldn’t reach his wife or son, he became worried and called the local police. To their surprise, the police found Albert at home sleeping, with junk food and takeout containers strewn all over the house and a pile of video games stacked up by the television. With a strange mixture of shame, entitlement, and defiance, he told the police why he had locked his mother in the basement.
“I just needed a break from her. I was about to explode under the pressure. She’s constantly pushing me to do my homework and practice piano. Once that’s done, she wants me to do extra piano and extra homework. I know what I did makes no sense, but it was either that or run away or jump off a bridge.”
Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? And it makes you think that Albert’s mother is a ruthless, cold-hearted, tiger mom who is ruining her son’s life. Like any story, there are always two sides. This is what Albert’s mom, Winnie, told me when I interviewed her:
“Before Albert was even born, I had a lot of pressure to make sure our child would succeed. Albert, like many children, carries the weight of all of our expectations. In China, if you don’t get into the right preschool, you don’t get into the right middle school, and then you don’t get into the right high school, and then you don’t get into the right college or university, and then you can’t get the right job and you become a nobody. So the pressure began even before pregnancy for me to eat the right foods that would help my child’s brain development.
“When Albert was six months old, I was prepping him for preschool admission. By the time he was one, I was quizzing him on body parts, colors, simple counting, and vocabulary. The focus on Albert took over my life. I planned his diet, his activities, his tutoring, and tutored him myself. When I wasn’t doing this, I was volunteering at his school or gathering information on how to improve our plans for him. We’ve now spent nearly all our savings on his tuition plus additional donations to his schools. Because of all this investment, Albert’s performance is paramount.
“We know it’s a lot of pressure, and we don’t want him to be sad or stressed. So now we buy him the latest video games, gadgets, candies, and fast foods—whatever he wants to make him happy. But I believe this has led him to become unhealthy—in his body and mind. He has no discipline. He has learned to manipulate my husband, me, and his grandparents simply by throwing a tantrum if he doesn’t get what he wants. He has become addicted to video games and now rushes through his homework and practice so he can play. He says it’s the only relaxing thing in his life.
“Yes, I understand he locked me downstairs because he needed a break from homework and piano. But I believe he also just wanted to play the latest video game that had been released that weekend. I don’t know what to do. He does well in school now because he’s only fourteen, but that won’t last very long with his attitude.
“He is obviously no longer scared of me, and we can’t just keep bribing him to do things. He’s losing his motivation. I’m worried about his future—nobody likes people like Albert. I don’t even like him. We left China one year ago because we wanted him to have different experiences. Perhaps it’s too late. I don’t like who he has become or who I have become. I’m really hoping you can help me.”
When I tell people the story of Albert and Winnie, they either nod their heads in recognition or shake their heads in judgment. A few of my teenage patients confess that they’ve fantasized about locking their parents away for a weekend as well! The 2012 case of the American teen who filed (and won) a civil stalking order against her parents (who secretly followed her around her college campus) is just another version of the same story.1 In addition, plenty of parents have fantasized about escaping from their teenagers—even if it’s to their own basement! Chances are, the phenomenon called “tiger parenting” of which Albert and Winnie were victims hasn’t left you untouched. Let me be perfectly clear: tiger parenting is not limited to a specific ethnic group. Tiger parents lurk everywhere. Amy Chua’s book did a lot to associate tiger parenting with East Asian families, but children from all backgrounds are equally likely to be victims of their tiger parents’ well-intentioned but ultimately damaging authoritarian regimes. I’ve seen a number of these children come through my clinic. You may have tried to distance yourself from this aggressive parenting style or felt like you were being pushed into it, based on the misguided belief that it’s the only way to “compete.”
Over time, Albert and Winnie did just fine. Thankfully, they realized they were both victims of tiger parenting. Winnie hadn’t felt right for some time about the way she was raising Albert, but felt stuck because she thought “everyone else was doing it too.” Once she stopped looking outside for what to do and turned her attention inward towards what she knew was right for her family, she made better choices. She balanced out the directing and hovering with bonding, role modeling, and guiding, and by doing so helped turn Albert towards a path of true health, happiness, and self-motivation.
New Pressures on Parents in the Twenty-First Century
Like Winnie, parents today confront a perfect storm of converging realities that put undue pressure on both themselves and their children. Some realities have been present since the dawn of parenting and others are new to the twenty-first century. Let’s start with some of today’s new realities—those that have appeared so suddenly and with such force that we’re not quite sure how to deal with them. It’s understandable that we all feel pressured into pressuring our children.
School admissions are tougher than ever. Standardized test scores, GPAs, and the quality of extracurricular activities needed for acceptance have steadily risen over the last one hundred years. Today, “ensuring” a good education means involving the whole family in everything from preschool applications to the university admissions cycle. Years before young students even set foot on the campus of their parents’ dreams, all kinds of time, money, and other resources have been devoted to the process of getting there. Once the battle for enrollment is won, parents struggle to pay steep tuition fees, manage their own volunteering expectations, and monitor their child’s performance, and then hope that it has all been enough to advance their child to the next step. It feels as if one mistake anywhere along this pursuit, like the wrong preschool, could mean the difference between a child’s lifelong success and lifelong failure.
Then there’s globalization, which is leading to greater competition between youth from developed countries and those from emerging giants such as China and India. Our children are now competing for university and college admission and/or jobs with both our neighbor’s children and children from Beijing to Buenos Aires. That means our children are competing against standards of behavior, thought processes, and levels of attainment we may know little about. Will our children be able to compete with the stereotypical all-work-and-no-play memorizers, super-human calculators, and spelling-bee champions coming out of other countries?
Technology continues to open new opportunities and close many others. Major industries, such as automobile manufacturing, agriculture, and even health care, may soon be dominated or administrated by robots. At the same time, our children are growing up with technology, and they’re turning to it for information, connection, and comfort. Will technology expand or shrink opportunities for our children as we proceed into the twenty-first century? All that’s certain is that technology is here to stay and is ever-changing. And changing us.
With technology comes more connectivity, which, like most things, has its pros and cons. The ability for children and parents to stay connected via cellphones is a great advantage (unless the cellphone is used to stifle a child’s independence). In addition, studies have shown that social media can help children who are socially awkward feel connected to others.2 So it’s not all bad. But surely a huge part of our jobs as parents and educators is to help our kids understand and navigate the world as it really is—and even a glance at social media is enough to see that it’s far from a realistic lens. Parents don’t post pictures of their exhausted selves, their children having tantrums, or their co-parenting disputes. Young people don’t post pictures of themselves studying or sharing dinner with their parents. That is, the real, everyday world is tirelessly edited out. What we see instead is the fantasy world in which we appear as we hope others will see us (for example, 40 percent of adolescent Facebook users report seeing pictures of their friends partying on the website3).
Obsessing over idealized depictions of other people’s lives is exactly what you should do if you want to be unhappy. A 2013 study in Michigan looked into how using Facebook influences happiness and how people rate their personal well-being.4 The researchers would text message the subjects five times a day over two weeks and have them answer questions to assess how they feel moment to moment and rate their overall satisfaction with their lives. What they found was that people who used Facebook more often had a more negative outlook on both their feelings in the moment and their overall life satisfaction. The more Facebook users were on the site during one time interval, the worse they would feel the next time they were contacted. Direct face-to-face communication between people didn’t result in associated negative ratings. Do we really want to spend our time online making ourselves miserable?
Then there’s the media. The twenty-four-hour news cycle and the ever-present media are inescapable anxiety producers. We have constant access to breaking news that has nothing to do with our lives. Cases of child abduction dominate the news cycle, not because they’re occurring more than they did twenty years ago, but because they keep us glued to our televisions and increase viewer ratings. An even more toxic anxiety seeps into the lives of anyone who compares his or her own day-to-day existence with that of the glamorous and the seemingly “real” people seen in the media. How can we simply be ourselves in a world dominated by sound bites and celebrities?
Advertising colonizes new spaces every day and uses more subtle tactics than ever before to reach us. The average person is exposed to as many as 3,000 advertising messages each day (via radio, television, billboards, the Internet, stores, and product placement in various media).5 The fundamental purpose of advertising is to make us feel that we need the product being thrust at us. It works by first preying on our fears and insecurities and then offering the product as the means to abate those feelings. We’re left with a “more is better” mentality. Advertising and marketing have also contributed to the “expertizing” of parenthood (since when did parents need experts anyway?!). Consider Baby Einstein, for example. Thanks to great marketing and parental hype, Baby Einstein videos became absolute musthaves in the early 2000s. Baby Einstein was touted as boosting a baby’s intelligence and even preventing neuron death. However, it turned out that Baby Einstein and other “educational” videos may have done more harm than good. For example, one study showed that infants who watched the videos learned an average of seven words fewer a day than those that did not.6 But these findings haven’t stopped millions of parents from spending a lot of money, time, and energy—all of which may be in short supply—to get what they’ve been convinced is “the best” for their children. We just can’t stop being influenced by marketing and experts—can we? Keep in mind that Einstein never watched any videos when he was a child, and he turned out OK.
As the medical director for Child and Youth Mental Health community programs in Vancouver, Dr. Kang has witnessed firsthand the consequences of parental pressure: anxiety disorders, high stress levels, suicides, and addictions. As the mother of three children and as the daughter of immigrant parents who struggled to give their children the “best” in life—her mother could not read and her father taught her math while they drove around in his taxi—Dr. Kang argues that often the simplest “benefits” we give our children are the most valuable. By trusting our deepest intuitions about what is best for our kids, we will in turn allow them to develop key dolphin traits to enable them to thrive in an increasingly complex world: adaptability, community-mindedness, creativity, and critical thinking.
Life is a journey through ever-changing waters, and dolphin parents know that the most valuable help we can give our children is to assist them in developing their own inner compass. Combining irrefutable science with unforgettable real-life stories, The Dolphin Parent walks readers through Dr. Kang’s four-part method for cultivating self-motivation. The book makes a powerful case that we are not forced to choose between being permissive or controlling. The third option—the option that will prepare our kids for success in a future that will require adaptability—is the dolphin way.
CHAPTER 1
THE REIGN OF THE TIGER
In my practice, I have the honor of being invited into the very unique personal lives of the children and families I work with. Sometimes, that invitation doesn’t come directly from patients themselves. One morning, my colleague asked me to meet him at an address not far from my house. The police were there. Working with the police is common in a child and youth practice, but this case was unusual. I’d been asked to assess a fourteen-year-old boy named Albert, who had been taken into custody after locking a woman in her own basement. It wasn’t any woman. It was his mother. Albert had locked her up for an entire weekend. His mother was safe, and she had had access to food and a bathroom. However, when her husband, who was calling from overseas, couldn’t reach his wife or son, he became worried and called the local police. To their surprise, the police found Albert at home sleeping, with junk food and takeout containers strewn all over the house and a pile of video games stacked up by the television. With a strange mixture of shame, entitlement, and defiance, he told the police why he had locked his mother in the basement.
“I just needed a break from her. I was about to explode under the pressure. She’s constantly pushing me to do my homework and practice piano. Once that’s done, she wants me to do extra piano and extra homework. I know what I did makes no sense, but it was either that or run away or jump off a bridge.”
Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? And it makes you think that Albert’s mother is a ruthless, cold-hearted, tiger mom who is ruining her son’s life. Like any story, there are always two sides. This is what Albert’s mom, Winnie, told me when I interviewed her:
“Before Albert was even born, I had a lot of pressure to make sure our child would succeed. Albert, like many children, carries the weight of all of our expectations. In China, if you don’t get into the right preschool, you don’t get into the right middle school, and then you don’t get into the right high school, and then you don’t get into the right college or university, and then you can’t get the right job and you become a nobody. So the pressure began even before pregnancy for me to eat the right foods that would help my child’s brain development.
“When Albert was six months old, I was prepping him for preschool admission. By the time he was one, I was quizzing him on body parts, colors, simple counting, and vocabulary. The focus on Albert took over my life. I planned his diet, his activities, his tutoring, and tutored him myself. When I wasn’t doing this, I was volunteering at his school or gathering information on how to improve our plans for him. We’ve now spent nearly all our savings on his tuition plus additional donations to his schools. Because of all this investment, Albert’s performance is paramount.
“We know it’s a lot of pressure, and we don’t want him to be sad or stressed. So now we buy him the latest video games, gadgets, candies, and fast foods—whatever he wants to make him happy. But I believe this has led him to become unhealthy—in his body and mind. He has no discipline. He has learned to manipulate my husband, me, and his grandparents simply by throwing a tantrum if he doesn’t get what he wants. He has become addicted to video games and now rushes through his homework and practice so he can play. He says it’s the only relaxing thing in his life.
“Yes, I understand he locked me downstairs because he needed a break from homework and piano. But I believe he also just wanted to play the latest video game that had been released that weekend. I don’t know what to do. He does well in school now because he’s only fourteen, but that won’t last very long with his attitude.
“He is obviously no longer scared of me, and we can’t just keep bribing him to do things. He’s losing his motivation. I’m worried about his future—nobody likes people like Albert. I don’t even like him. We left China one year ago because we wanted him to have different experiences. Perhaps it’s too late. I don’t like who he has become or who I have become. I’m really hoping you can help me.”
When I tell people the story of Albert and Winnie, they either nod their heads in recognition or shake their heads in judgment. A few of my teenage patients confess that they’ve fantasized about locking their parents away for a weekend as well! The 2012 case of the American teen who filed (and won) a civil stalking order against her parents (who secretly followed her around her college campus) is just another version of the same story.1 In addition, plenty of parents have fantasized about escaping from their teenagers—even if it’s to their own basement! Chances are, the phenomenon called “tiger parenting” of which Albert and Winnie were victims hasn’t left you untouched. Let me be perfectly clear: tiger parenting is not limited to a specific ethnic group. Tiger parents lurk everywhere. Amy Chua’s book did a lot to associate tiger parenting with East Asian families, but children from all backgrounds are equally likely to be victims of their tiger parents’ well-intentioned but ultimately damaging authoritarian regimes. I’ve seen a number of these children come through my clinic. You may have tried to distance yourself from this aggressive parenting style or felt like you were being pushed into it, based on the misguided belief that it’s the only way to “compete.”
Over time, Albert and Winnie did just fine. Thankfully, they realized they were both victims of tiger parenting. Winnie hadn’t felt right for some time about the way she was raising Albert, but felt stuck because she thought “everyone else was doing it too.” Once she stopped looking outside for what to do and turned her attention inward towards what she knew was right for her family, she made better choices. She balanced out the directing and hovering with bonding, role modeling, and guiding, and by doing so helped turn Albert towards a path of true health, happiness, and self-motivation.
New Pressures on Parents in the Twenty-First Century
Like Winnie, parents today confront a perfect storm of converging realities that put undue pressure on both themselves and their children. Some realities have been present since the dawn of parenting and others are new to the twenty-first century. Let’s start with some of today’s new realities—those that have appeared so suddenly and with such force that we’re not quite sure how to deal with them. It’s understandable that we all feel pressured into pressuring our children.
School admissions are tougher than ever. Standardized test scores, GPAs, and the quality of extracurricular activities needed for acceptance have steadily risen over the last one hundred years. Today, “ensuring” a good education means involving the whole family in everything from preschool applications to the university admissions cycle. Years before young students even set foot on the campus of their parents’ dreams, all kinds of time, money, and other resources have been devoted to the process of getting there. Once the battle for enrollment is won, parents struggle to pay steep tuition fees, manage their own volunteering expectations, and monitor their child’s performance, and then hope that it has all been enough to advance their child to the next step. It feels as if one mistake anywhere along this pursuit, like the wrong preschool, could mean the difference between a child’s lifelong success and lifelong failure.
Then there’s globalization, which is leading to greater competition between youth from developed countries and those from emerging giants such as China and India. Our children are now competing for university and college admission and/or jobs with both our neighbor’s children and children from Beijing to Buenos Aires. That means our children are competing against standards of behavior, thought processes, and levels of attainment we may know little about. Will our children be able to compete with the stereotypical all-work-and-no-play memorizers, super-human calculators, and spelling-bee champions coming out of other countries?
Technology continues to open new opportunities and close many others. Major industries, such as automobile manufacturing, agriculture, and even health care, may soon be dominated or administrated by robots. At the same time, our children are growing up with technology, and they’re turning to it for information, connection, and comfort. Will technology expand or shrink opportunities for our children as we proceed into the twenty-first century? All that’s certain is that technology is here to stay and is ever-changing. And changing us.
With technology comes more connectivity, which, like most things, has its pros and cons. The ability for children and parents to stay connected via cellphones is a great advantage (unless the cellphone is used to stifle a child’s independence). In addition, studies have shown that social media can help children who are socially awkward feel connected to others.2 So it’s not all bad. But surely a huge part of our jobs as parents and educators is to help our kids understand and navigate the world as it really is—and even a glance at social media is enough to see that it’s far from a realistic lens. Parents don’t post pictures of their exhausted selves, their children having tantrums, or their co-parenting disputes. Young people don’t post pictures of themselves studying or sharing dinner with their parents. That is, the real, everyday world is tirelessly edited out. What we see instead is the fantasy world in which we appear as we hope others will see us (for example, 40 percent of adolescent Facebook users report seeing pictures of their friends partying on the website3).
Obsessing over idealized depictions of other people’s lives is exactly what you should do if you want to be unhappy. A 2013 study in Michigan looked into how using Facebook influences happiness and how people rate their personal well-being.4 The researchers would text message the subjects five times a day over two weeks and have them answer questions to assess how they feel moment to moment and rate their overall satisfaction with their lives. What they found was that people who used Facebook more often had a more negative outlook on both their feelings in the moment and their overall life satisfaction. The more Facebook users were on the site during one time interval, the worse they would feel the next time they were contacted. Direct face-to-face communication between people didn’t result in associated negative ratings. Do we really want to spend our time online making ourselves miserable?
Then there’s the media. The twenty-four-hour news cycle and the ever-present media are inescapable anxiety producers. We have constant access to breaking news that has nothing to do with our lives. Cases of child abduction dominate the news cycle, not because they’re occurring more than they did twenty years ago, but because they keep us glued to our televisions and increase viewer ratings. An even more toxic anxiety seeps into the lives of anyone who compares his or her own day-to-day existence with that of the glamorous and the seemingly “real” people seen in the media. How can we simply be ourselves in a world dominated by sound bites and celebrities?
Advertising colonizes new spaces every day and uses more subtle tactics than ever before to reach us. The average person is exposed to as many as 3,000 advertising messages each day (via radio, television, billboards, the Internet, stores, and product placement in various media).5 The fundamental purpose of advertising is to make us feel that we need the product being thrust at us. It works by first preying on our fears and insecurities and then offering the product as the means to abate those feelings. We’re left with a “more is better” mentality. Advertising and marketing have also contributed to the “expertizing” of parenthood (since when did parents need experts anyway?!). Consider Baby Einstein, for example. Thanks to great marketing and parental hype, Baby Einstein videos became absolute musthaves in the early 2000s. Baby Einstein was touted as boosting a baby’s intelligence and even preventing neuron death. However, it turned out that Baby Einstein and other “educational” videos may have done more harm than good. For example, one study showed that infants who watched the videos learned an average of seven words fewer a day than those that did not.6 But these findings haven’t stopped millions of parents from spending a lot of money, time, and energy—all of which may be in short supply—to get what they’ve been convinced is “the best” for their children. We just can’t stop being influenced by marketing and experts—can we? Keep in mind that Einstein never watched any videos when he was a child, and he turned out OK.
