After living in Japan for five years, where praise of children was spare and authentic, writer Christine Gross-Loh returned home to the United States where children earn trophies for matching their socks.
At a visit to the local shopping center, for instance, Gross-Loh watched with surprise as a father congratulated his young child for “good riding” on the mall carousel.
Gross-Loh’s experience raising her four young children in a different culture led to the book, “Parenting Without Borders.” As a child of a Korean immigrant family growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania, she also experienced cross-cultural parenting firsthand.
I had a chance to talk to Gross-Loh about her book while she was here last month for the AJC Decatur Book Festival.
Her contention is not that Americans are hapless at child rearing — she praises the American embrace of diversity and individuality — but that successful practices and philosophies from abroad are worth examining. She cautions that the U.S. is turning childhood into a race where nobody really wins.
The book explores parenting differences and pitfalls, looking closely at the self-esteem zeitgeist of the 1980s and 1990s in this country that began with the perfectly reasonable tenet that children gain confidence and resilience through setting and achieving goals.
Unfortunately, Gross-Loh says the concept devolved into a belief that children have a right to be happy and feel good about themselves no matter what. Self-esteem trumped self-control and self-discipline. She cites research that America has seen 30 years of concerted effort to bolster the self-esteem of its kids, yet they’ve never been more depressed.
Gross-Loh recalls an American boy asking her and her children how to say, “I’m awesome” in Japanese.
“It was a very understandable question for an American child to ask. But there’s no Japanese translation because it is something a Japanese child would never say,” says Gross-Loh, who holds a doctorate in East Asian history from Harvard.
A Swedish teen who studied in the United States told Gross-Loh that she was puzzled by the constant message to young children here that “you can be whatever you want to be.”
In Sweden, the teenager said, “You reach for something that make sense. You try hard, but there’s no urging to go for the extreme. Having a good-enough life — just enough travel, toys, food — is all you need … just good enough so that you and your kids have it well, without going over the top.”
While U.S. schools and parents over-inflate children’s sense of self-importance, Gross-Loh realized a dichotomy; they underestimate what kids can actually accomplish through effort. They invest their time and their money in approaches that don’t raise reliant, compassionate and successful children.
Gross-Loh explains Japanese children believe hours of practice, struggle and hard work lead to success. Even 3-year-olds are expected to memorize long passages of dialogue and lyrics for school performances.
In Japan, children are not labeled gifted, says Gross-Loh. “Instead of dividing kids up, there is a pervasive belief — reinforced in school — that it’s less about what you’re born with than what you do.”
So, children devote hours to school concerts, even practicing before school. Yes, self-expression ought to be encouraged in children, says Gross-Loh, but so should opportunities for kids to work toward excellence. “The underlying message kids get in Japan is that they are stronger than we think,” she writes.
American students are more likely to conclude that innate talent is the determinant of success, that some of them have a knack for math or writing and others don’t, a belief that prevents them from persevering.
In much of her book, Gross-Loh comes down on the side of less is more — less monitoring of children, less parental intervention in every aspect of a child’s day including normal playground skirmishes, less stuff, less overscheduling and less empty praise.
She presents strong arguments against the school-readiness fixation that has led to academics replacing free play in preschool, warning that kids can end up with greater anxiety about tests, lower creativity and less enjoyment of school.
An overemphasis on school readiness can backfire, says Gross-Loh, citing a cross-cultural European study that found children who learned to read at age 5 had more trouble in school than those who learned at age 7.
But there are a few areas where she concludes more is needed: more child-led experiences, more time outside, more challenges, and more faith that when given choices, children will make the right ones.
