It is a brilliant article, and she’s courageous to have written it (because she spoke the truth but will certainly suffer countless attacks for being “politically incorrect” in her statements)
I married a Chinese woman who raises our kids using this same approach, and it yields benefits every day for our kids. My Chinese in-laws also live with us, and I’m also grateful every day for their strict no-nonsense HIGH EXPECTATIONS approach to helping raise our children.
My wife teaches at one of the highest ranked high schools in the entire Bay Area. (Usually ranked in top 50 in the nation.) During college application season, she gets several requests each week for recommendation letters for her Asian students applying to America’s best universities and colleges. We’re talking Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc.
I end up writing those recommendation letters, because my wife’s English writing skills are not the best. (she teaches Mandarin, not English!)
For writing each letter, I work off the “cliff’s notes” brag sheet supplied by the child’s parents. It lists facts of all the kids accomplishments, and backs them up with actual copies of certificates and awards.
Writing dozens of such recommendation letters has been an EDUCATION for me on how these Asian students were raised by their parents with the the college application process in mind.
It is no understatement that the mothers/fathers of these Asian kids started planning their kids lives around college application strategy when these kids were two and three years old! For example, they would start the kid on violin or piano at three years old.
They don’t just get straight-A’s in all courses, including ADVANCED placement courses.
These are typical accomplishments for these Asian kids by their senior high school year:
1) Play either cello, violin, or piano, so expertly that they have won state competitions and may have played Carnegie Hall. Lead musician in the high school band.
2) Have completed technical summer internship (while still in high school!) at institutions such as MIT, Stanford, Berkley, Lawrence Livermore Nat Lab, etc.
3) Multiple examples of months-long or years-long volunteering contributions, such as spending summers in South America, supporting medical teams doing free reconstructive surgery for children with cleft palates
4) Held multiple leadership positions, such as student body president, or head of debate team, or similar.
And YES, I’m damn proud when one of my recommendation letters helps these kids land a spot at Harvard or MIT or Stanford, but the truth is that these kids did all the work and preparation starting at 2 years old.
I should also acknowledge that the Chinese parents do not have a monopoly on this approach to raising kids.
I see this child-rearing approach also in the Korean, and Japanese, and Indian parents. I end up writing the recommendation letters for kids of those ethnicity also, and their accomplishments equal those of the Chinese ethnicity.
Finally, one more very important point.
The kids I’m writing about DO NOT involve themselves at all in the catty social-circle cliques so popular with and important to the Caucasian high school kids. The Asians avoid the DISTRACTION of those cliques.
