Parenting Styles

Context The ELC at City University publishes four online newsletters per year and you have been asked to submit an article. The ten best papers will be printed in the newsletter in the coming year. Readers include scholars and students from various departments in the university and around the world. These readers have an interest in the subject but may not have a specialised knowledge in the field. You should choose one of the following titles: 1. A tiger mom equals a better future. 2. Aggressive parenting damages childrens self-worth. You may choose an alternative focus on the tiger mom theme if you prefer, but you must get approval from your teacher. You should read widely around the issue and become familiar with different standpoints in order to make your own, informed opinion and be able to support it thoroughly, using a variety of sources. 1. Two sources will be given to you by your instructor. You must use one of these in your paper. 2. In addition, you can choose two more of your own sources. 3. You can use a maximum of four sources in your paper. You should use some ideas from your research (the provided sources or others that you have found) AND your own ideas to write the essay. You should clearly express your opinion and this should be supported with in-depth elaboration. The Paper must be written in academic English. You should follow APA referencing style. 750-1000 words

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Essay submission instructions: You should include an introduction, body paragraphs showing your main points, a conclusion and a reference list following APA style. Your essay should be typed, double-spaced and with a font size of 12. Margins should be 2.5 cm. You can find an example of a well-structured and properly formatted academic essay in Unit 1 and Appendix 2 of your EAP Part 2 course book. When an idea or a piece of information does not come from you, you MUST acknowledge the source. Direct quotations can be no more than 10% of your essay length. Block quotations are permitted up to a maximum of 3 lines. Remember that in academic writing paraphrasing and summary are more commonly used than direct quotation. All three submissions (for peer feedback, teacher feedback and final grading), should be done through Turnitin, a plagiarism detection program in BlackBoard, one or two days ahead of the submission deadline. You should print out the Turnitin report, which usually takes a few hours but sometimes up to a day to generate. On the day of submission, you should hand in a hard copy of your essay and the Turnitin report to your teacher. This coursework assessment is worth 15% of the overall course grade. You will be assessed on Task fulfillment Discourse competencies Language competencies Source integration

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If your teacher feels that your essay is not a representative sample of your OWN work, you may be asked to take a 1-hour writing test in the ELC. You must submit all three versions of your essay to Turnitin. If the Originality Report shows that more than 10% of your 1st or 2nd draft is plagiarized we will ask you to rewrite it. If your final version has a similarity index of more than 10%, you will be awarded U for all assessment domains. While we understand that you are keen to improve your essay and get a good grade, you must remember that we are trying to conduct a FAIR assessment. We would like to assess a sample of YOUR work and not a piece of work which has been partly or wholly written by somebody else. This process writing assessment provides you with a chance to achieve

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Sources You must use one of the following sources : Source 1 http://www.livescience.com/18023-tiger-parenting-tough-kids.html Source 2 (relevant sections have been selected from a longer journal article) Adapted from Qin, D.B., Chang, T., Han, E.J. and Chee G.(2012) Parents and Childrens Internal Conicts. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, (134), 35-57. In addition to outward conicts between parents and adolescents, adolescents reported that they themselves, as well as their parents, struggled with internal conicts. In the literature, Chinese American parents are often depicted as singularly focusing on educational achievement at all costs, with some resemblance to the tiger mother Amy Chua depicted in her book (Louie, 2004; Sue & Okazaki, 1990). From the students perspectives, however, parents experienced much more internal conflicts in pushing their children to succeed. They were often torn and internally conflicted about what they wanted for their children. From the students accounts, when their parents saw that they were under too much pressure and were working too hard (a school survey shows that students in the school on average slept for 5 hours a night), they often felt guilty and empathic and tried to lessen or completely remove the pressure. For example, in Mings family, his parents exerted a tremendous amount of pressure on him, including threatening to not fund him if he did not get into an Ivy League university. However, at other times, both my mom and dad are having like kind of this sad-like tone, like Its okay, it doesnt really matter. Just try your best. They dont really like push me to do anything. Similarly, in Lucys home, her parents asked her if she wanted to transfer to an alternative less competitive school: When they *parents+ see you working so hard, and youre so tired all the time, they kind of feel guilty for putting you through it . . . Theyre just like, whatever, do your own thing. I dont care anymore if you do well or not. Because its your life, I dont care. Its too stressful for us. Likewise, in Vincents family, his parents who usually pushed him very hard felt sympathetic after seeing their son struggling with his workload, Because when they see me do all this work, they say,

Oh my, youre so stressed out. You should relax. They have all this guilt, like no, they have all this like sympathy for me. Thus, from the students perspectives, while the parents often tried to control their children and impose high academic standards and expectations on them, they also tried to give their children more autonomy and independence. Endeavours to control their children seemed to engender a lot of stress for both parents and children. As a result, at times, parents would express their desire to let go of their strict control. Similar to their parents, children were also torn about their feelings in their interactions with parents. Although they clearly resented high parental pressure and control, as discussed earlier, they also felt grateful for parental pressure and craved parental attention in the form of pressure when they felt it was absent. During the interviews, many students talked about feeling grateful for their parents pressure. For example, Max acknowledged that his mother played an important role in his schooling: If it wasnt for her, I wouldnt be like where I am today. In the absence of parental pressure, they often felt lost and sad. Ming commented on his parents change of attitude of not pushing him hard at times, Its like a really huge burden off my chest. I dont have to like really think about it. I feel like I have a lot more options on my table. But then, I myself feel at times kind of sad because I feel like I should be pushed, like someone is supposed to like push me. Because Im so used to them like encouraging me to do this or do that. Thus, while he resented parental pressure, Ming also felt sad when his parents were not pushing him. About half of the students in our study came from low socioeconomic families where parents did not receive high levels of education themselves and were quite removed from their childrens education. In these families, parents tended to give their children more freedom, letting them be in charge of their education more so than in other families. Although children enjoyed this sense of independence and control, they also wished that their parents would be more involved. For example, Lucas commented on his torn feelings about his parents: Like when you dont have parents to help you sometimes, like, push you sort of, you feel like theres something missing . . . sometimes I like enjoy like the relatively larger independence that I have compared to my friends, but then like sometimes like I get back tests and see that theyre lower than what I wanted them to be, I sort of wish my parents were there to push me harder sometimes. For Lucas, while he enjoyed the freedom and independence, he also wished that his parents were not so detached from his academic life. Students like Lucas both enjoyed the autonomy and independence they have in their lives and yearned for higher expectations and more involvement from their parents. In these families, educational pressure became both a source of contention and a

form of parental attention and love. Although parents and children experience conflicts in their attitudes toward other races and feelings toward parent country of origin, analyses of student accounts show that both parents and children seem to have internal conflicts in their own ethnic identities. From the students perspectives, their parents were often torn about their own ethnic identity and feelings toward China. On the one hand, they wanted to pass on their heritage culture to their children. Many students reported that their parents pushed them to befriend other Asian students as an attempt to keep their heritage culture. However, most parents came to the United States many years ago and have assimilated into the U.S. society. For example, Lucas talked about how his parents moved the whole family closer to Chinatown so that they could be closer to their culture of origin. However, he also commented on his parents limited knowledge of traditional Chinese customs, Yeah, like the most they know about is, Oh, I get red envelopes on Chinese New Year stuff like that and like they dont really like know a lot of other aspects of it, like the more traditional stuff. Lucas also talked about his surprise upon discovering his parents musical tastes: Its like its really surprising when I found out my dad listened to Elvis and Frank Sinatra . . . I found out my mother listened to the Rolling Stones and knew who they were. . . . its like really shocking . . . because you think like your parents are so like, theyre more connected to their culture. But you nd they like sometimes have conflicts too. Interestingly, in many families, the 2008 Olympics brought out these internal conflicts in parents. For example, Elizabeth commented that her parents are torn between cheering for China and America. Lucass parents also felt torn, but ended up cheering for Chinahe followed his parents and did so as well. Students were also torn in their identities. They wanted to feel proud of the Chinese culture and were often irritated by negative comments from peers about China. For example, Lijuan talked about feeling annoyed by peers who dissed China: Twinkie, right? Theyre yellow or black on the outside but theyre white inside . . . he will like, he will like diss China, like will just like totally like destroy the Chinese image . . . its just annoying sometimes because like I was born here. I guess like I have this connection with China. However, students also felt ambivalent and struggled with the Asian identity in the United States, especially the many stereotypes associated with being Asian, such as Asians are only good at math, really quiet, they go home and study all the time, and have really strict parents.

Although they tried to keep certain aspects of their native culture, they also wanted to break the Asian stereotypes. For example, Lucas talked about his efforts to excel in English and shun math and science: Its sort of like the feeling that, if you do well in English, its sort of like, whoa, this Asian kids doing well in English. (p.49-50.)

EL0200 English for Academic Purposes

(Term Paper Final Version)

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