Tiger Parenting; an Option Worth Considering

When we look at today’s youngsters, we can clearly notice a growing problem. The new generation seems not to be focused on education, they lack extra-curricular activities and aesthetic skills, and they don’t have respect for adults and teachers. School violence has become a major issue in majority of our schools. Overall, we feel that our children are becoming a lost generation.

Parents have an immense impact on child. It is the way of parenting that makes a child good or bad, lazy or active, compassionate or violent. As an Asian country, the bond between Sri Lankan parent and their child is greater than western countries. Thus the way which a parent interact with their children is extremely important. In general, Sri Lankan parents have a reputation for being tough and strict. It is harder to find a person who is not subjected to corporal punishment at home or school but are those parenting methods effective? Do they create better children? Many educationists, doctors and teachers now reject the idea of corporal punishment to make the children disciplined.  What needed is a strict parenting concept which is effective and which don’t harm children physically and mentally. 

A concept called tiger parenting may come in handy when dealing with the above dilemma. Tiger Parenting was introduced by Dr. Amy Chua, a Junior Professor of Harvard Law School. Her book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” created a worldwide debate on parenting. She describes her own experience of bringing up her two daughters in a strict manner. Dr Chua was brought up by traditional Chinese parents so that influence helped her to develop a method to guide her children to excellence.

Tiger parenting doesn’t mean that parents need to use caning, whipping or other types of corporal punishments to make the children disciplined. It is a system to make specific targets for children in terms of their academic and social achievements and constantly monitoring and guiding them by whatever means to accomplish them. Tiger parents believe that their children can achieve almost anything with strict control and discipline. They control what their children may read, what TV programs they may watch, who their children be friends with etc. Main point in tiger parenting is the active involvement in child’s academic life by parents.

Dr. Amy Chua’s parenting contradicts liberal western style parenting in which the self esteem of a child is put in front of his/her parent’s ambitions but are they similar to traditional Sri Lankan parenting? Of course Sri Lankan parents may have a vision of their children’s future but do they have a practical approach or a plan to guide the children? Sri Lankan parents may very well be involved in child’s education up until the grade 5 scholarship exam which is named notoriously as “The exam of the parents”. Then gradually parental involvement in child’s education diminishes. When it comes to studying for Advanced Level Examination, students are completely on their own sometimes lost in a competitive battle without a clue about what field they are going to choose in the future. Parents only realize the lack of their guidance when a child got failed in the exam.

It is fair to say that today’s children are unbalanced personalities. Children and their parents only focus on academic performance while completely forgetting that a child should have a competence in academic and aesthetic fields alike. A true super child should be able to make a balance in all the above sections. Preparing the child for future career demands is also important. He or she should be ready for jobs which have not been invented yet. Obviously mathematics and science play a crucial role in the future knowledge based economy so pushing children more and more to mathematics and science related education is a good move. Perfectionism is always administered by a tiger parent. Any grade except straight ‘A’ is not accepted. Rewarding children for just passing an exam makes them lazy. Children should understand that rewards and compliments are very hard to gain but when they do, it reflects the perfection in their hard work.

The ultimate goal of tiger parenting is to shape the child in to a balanced person. While concerning on academic excellence only may cause unnecessary stress on children but pushing children to be involved in sports and aesthetic activities will make a balance. We should give our children what they lack most; discipline and self-control. Being a disciplinarian may not a pleasant experience at first but when the child realize the true meaning of being strict, they will start to respect you. Dr Chua’s daughter Sophia also expressed her gratitude to her mother’s parenting style by an open letter published in the New York Post in January 2011.

Today’s younger generation is inexperienced and easily be misled. It is their parents’ duty to shape their child like steel in a mould and to make a respectable person from them. Most probably it might be a bitter experience at first but when the child immerges as a self-disciplined and balanced person; it will be the pinnacle of strict parenting. Dr Chua’s tiger parenting may not be entirely feasible for Sri Lankan child upbringing but nevertheless it may provide some valuable clues. I strongly recommend all the parents to assess the effectiveness of their parenting style and make the necessary adjustments to it.

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Population Crisis; What shall we do?

World’s population is now more than 7 billion and rising rapidly. It has reached that point one year ago in October 2011. As humans, we have an immense impact on planet earth so complications arise naturally with the rising population. Overpopulation is now a major challenge to the long list of obstacles faced by humankind.

Throughout the human history, overpopulation has never been a problem before. Humans like all the other species need resources to survive. If a species have access to plenty of resources, it thrives while that species is starved of resources, its population declines or probably faces extinction (like what happened to Dinosaurs). Usually balancing the population of species is done by nature itself. Story of human population is somewhat different. Until the first half of the last century, the human population stayed under 2 billion. Due to the rapid growth it only took another half a century to nearly triple that population.

We generally think that adding more and more members to our huge human family is a good thing but as any species needs certain resources such as air, food, water and habitat to live, humans also needs those basic necessities and much more to survive and human needs and expectations are getting bigger and bigger every day. Throughout the last 50 years, expansion of quantity and quality of necessities such as energy, transportation, housing leads to perfect condition for a human population boom. Although population rise started with the industrial revolution in the 19^th century, only after the World War 2, it started skyrocketing.

Humans to generate wealth industry, production and economic activity are needed. Those needs more people. With additional wealth humans can breed and feed a new generation which helps to create more and more wealth. This cycle continues to function perfectly until couple of decades before the last century ends.

Above mentioned economic model is obsolete nowadays due to two reasons.

1.       We don’t need much labor and human skills to generate wealth. Smart technologies, industries and production don’t need much labor. The way we create wealth is also changed. World relies more on smart technologies, financial industry and service sector which requires less human participation that age old industry and agriculture
2.  Depleting resources; Humans entirely dependent upon natural resources such as minerals, metals, oil and arable land. Now humans don’t have the steady supply of resources to generate wealth which helps to keep and increase population

Problems

Large population consumes lot of natural resources which took thousands of years t naturally form. Production of those resources can’t keep up with the rising population.

This earth is not only designed for humans but we take the whole world for granted. The truth is humans are mere part of the world’s Eco system. Natural resources and generally the environment are used by every other plant and animal. Over-consumption and rising demand puts strain on the environment as well. This leads to environmental pollution which dangers not only humans’ future but also the whole worlds’ future.

Human standard of living was rising with the increasing population. This means people can live longer. But most of those old people don’t contribute anything to the creation of wealth; it becomes the duty of young to serve their elders from their wealth. This practice is highly appreciated in some cultures, especially in Asia but beyond this duty of safeguarding senior citizens lays a heavy burden in younger generation’s shoulders.

With the rising global population, especially in 3^rd world countries, an emigration boom is created. People are trying to migrate to rich countries in search of opportunities. Most of the Asian and North African people are trying to migrate to Western European countries and to United States. This mass migration creates disruptions between the immigrants and local people. Nowadays when people migrate to other countries they don’t embrace the local culture. They tend to communalize in their own religious or racial segments. Since western countries have lower birth rates compared to immigrants, immigrant community grows faster and creates its own sub cultures. Most of the time immigrant and local cultures don’t jell with each other well. Sudden demographic shifts are dangerous for a county’s future for example, in United Kingdom, immigration and immigrant cultures have become a big problem which has led to racial and religious conflicts more than once.  

Global population is rising in a way that the nature can’t control. Population boom may explode one day but it puts the entire humanity in jeopardy. Experts have found out that the ideal population which should be living in earth is 2 Billion. We have two solutions with us. Either find another plant to put the extra 5 Billion humans or reduce the population.

Since science is not able to find any plant suitable to us other than earth, the one and only option is population reduction. Even with that solution, we may encounter some social problems.

1.       We can’t move population to less populated countries because of cultural problems

2.       We can’t kill old people or reduce health benefits due to social and ethical issues.

3.       We can’t selectively give the chance to live for the healthiest babies like ancient Spartans did (Which sounds like a good idea) but not a single mother will like the idea of killing her baby even for the benefit of entire humanity.

We need a world-wide systematic reduction of births like the Chinese did with their one-child-policy. Like valuation and devaluation of a country’s currency, governments should have a plan specifying how many people are needed for the future to plan the birth policy. If the country can sustain more people, less restricted birth policy can be enforced. If the population is growing, strict laws regarding number of children can be brought forward. While making policy changed, the scientific community should be able to find ways to sustain large population from limited resources without affecting the environment.

We too need to change and adjust their high-end, energy-consuming lifestyles. That surely be uncomfortable since we are too comfortable with our life but if we keep on going like this, the end is painful than ever. Overpopulation is created by us. Before it consumes us and reduce humanity to rubble, we should act bravely and take drastic measures to prevent that from happening. 

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