#tigerparents

[joelekm]

From Strict Tiger Mom to Best Friend | Asian Mom Apology | Parenting Untapped Ep 13

Just saw Parenting Untapped Ep 13 – Aly and Meiqi share a heartfelt conversation about growing up with a strict, high-achieving parent and how that relationship changes over time. It’s a beautiful reflection on parenting dynamics and the journey from strictness to friendship!

[tyyyger]

Annual Lunar New Year CUHK Reunion Dinner #cuhk #chosenfamily #tigerparents (at Tai Wu Restaurant) https://www.instagram.com/p/BuQMtt2ndLB/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=c67r5y99xqwi

[stag28]

"In 2008, the year Mr Woods won his last major, 12% of Americans aged six or less were playing organised sport, up from 9% in 1997, when he won his first. Yet a growing body of research suggests that specialisation—the intense, year-round practice of a single activity at the expense of others—is dangerous for the youngest athletes, while picking a sport later on is in fact more likely to lead to an elite athletic career. Focusing on one sport as a youngster greatly increases the risk of injury [..] high-school athletes who specialised sustained 60% more new lower-body injuries in a year than did those who played a range of sports. That gap still existed after controlling for gender, age and sport; more than a third of football, softball, volleyball, basketball and tennis players considered themselves specialists. These results are consistent with other research. [..] young tennis specialists are 1.5 times more likely to do damage to themselves than generalists are, while the odds of injury triple for youth baseball pitchers that complete 100 innings in a year. [..] Striplings that specialise also have a higher risk of burnout. They practise the same sport relentlessly, which can leave them fatigued and stressed in their early teenage years: [..] children who become sport stars tend to do fewer hours a week of serious practice in their eventual discipline than those who don’t quite make it. Collectively, elite performers only put in the extra shifts in their late teens. Similarly a study from Denmark found that “near-elite” athletes tended to start their sporting careers earlier than did those who became the real deal, who had done less training as adolescents but had surged ahead by their twenties. [..] Athletes who pick a single sport later have longer to try a range of them—which means they can pick the one that is the best fit, rather than a discipline that they have been ushered towards by early growth or ambitious parents. They can also benefit from new skills learned in other games. Novak Djokovic has credited his flexibility and rapid movement on the tennis court to his years skiing. Conversely, those who knuckle down prematurely are at risk of limiting their motor-skill development, according to a 2015 paper, which recommends “more opportunities for free, unstructured play” and “periodised strength and conditioning” to promote movement and limit injury. In spite of these findings, professional teams are pursuing the best underage talent ever-more aggressively. Premier League football clubs reportedly scout players as young as five; FC Barcelona’s famed youth academy has a team of children born in 2009. These programmes risk selecting players who are merely the most physically developed. This is one of the contributing factors to the “relative age effect”, whereby professional athletes are more likely to be the oldest—and therefore the biggest—in their age groups. In Premier League football academies, 45% are born between September (the cut-off for age-group teams in the UK) and November, while only 10% are born between June and August. Surprisingly, the same bias exists even once players approach adulthood. A study in 2011 found that baseball players who were young for their draft classes—even by a few months—tended to go on to outperform the average production from the slots where they were chosen. Their older counterparts generally performed worse than expectations. This research has significant implications. Not only is so-called “tiger parenting” a recipe for a joyless childhood—it is detrimental to a youngster’s chances of later success."

[brewedmusings-blog]

Two Faces

As far as I know, the only person I know who follows a medium dark coffee with a cortado every morning is Emi. Every morning, she would walk into Render Coffee reciting her life mantra. 

Be strong and courageous.

Do not fear or be in dread of them,

for it is the Lord your God who goes with you. - Deut 31:6

At least she started each of our mornings together with those words. It has been a long time since I heard her say those words, but still I think of them with every morning coffee. 

I first met Emi when we began frequenting the same coffee shop on the corner of Magazine and Jefferson, where we were both focused on our books; I was writing my first novel and she was finishing As I Lay Dying. We started talking after standing up for our afternoon coffee refill at the same time. We were both 25, her birthday was a month earlier than mine. 

I had moved home from Boston to finish my novel. Emi had moved out of her house to live closer to the school she taught at. If I recall correctly, it was a Saturday when we first met, but we started meeting shortly after to grab coffee and have breakfast every morning. For breakfast, she always had her coffee and cortado with a strawberry cream cheese bagel. She told me she started teaching as a temporary job before medical school, but she never could leave. 

"Medicine?" I asked. "I can see you as a doctor, but you sound like you enjoy teaching. Do you think you will go to medical school?" 

"My parents always told me that. That I could be a doctor."

I could sense the direction our conversation was going.

"Tiger parents? My parents pushed me to become a doctor. Or a lawyer. Anything but a novelist, really." I said. 

"Yeah, it wasn't until after my first day as a teacher that I realized the two lives I lived, the two faces I put on."

"Realized?"

"When you are responsible for an overcrowded classroom of kids, I didn't have energy to spare wearing my perfect daughter mask. Once I discarded that, working as a doctor no longer appealed to me."